"Now do you see what I'm getting at?" Golfin said. "The mechanism must be the same in both instances. An underlying mechanism. In amnesia a person may suffer a brain injury, or a person may be under a terrific compulsion to escape the present. In either case the person jumps over a period of days or years in, seemingly, an instant--and refuses to return. In prophetic dreams the person jumps into the future to an instant when something crucial is taking place, and returns to the present with memory of it." I looked at my own watch and said, "Any other time I would like to listen, but what are you driving at?" * * * * * He frowned and glanced at his watch. "Forty-one minutes," he said. "This is what I'm driving at. If I could discover the mechanism by which the mind leaps into the future, and returns, I would have a means of doing that myself. I could, possibly, go to tomorrow and buy a newspaper and see what it says, and return to today with that knowledge." "I see now!" Sarah Fish said, quivering with excitement. "That's how you learned that Mr. Smith is to be murdered!" "So you did discover a way?" I said. "I did. That's why I'm here. For some time now I have been going into the future at will, and also into the past. I've learned how to control it, the length of time I stay there, and just how far into the future or the past I go." "It sounds good," I admitted. "How could you change things?" He glanced at his watch worriedly. "We haven't much time," he said. "A little over half an hour. What I want to do is this. I have the instruments with me to send you into the future to the moment you are dying. I want you to go there and see if you don't know then who killed you, and how. You will return to the present moment with that knowledge, and be able to avoid death. At least--" He smiled encouragingly. "At least I hope you will." "And if I don't?" He shrugged. "This is my first serious attempt to change the past. Sooner or later I will succeed." He had reached into his breast pocket again. Now he brought out something like a fat fountain pen. "I don't know," I said uneasily. "You sure this doesn't hurt?" He unscrewed the end of the thing. There was a short hollow needle on it, with what looked like a trigger that had swung out into position against the side. "I've used it on myself many times," he said. He started toward me. "Wait a minute," I said, backing up a step and holding up my hand. "This is going to take me up to the instant I'm dying?" "That's right," he said, "and I want you to try, in that single instant you are there, to find out who did it. Think where you were when it happened, and who might have done it." "You sure it won't kill me?" I asked. He took another step toward me. "Of course not," he said.