White grunted. "Of course, he was--as he saw it." "And he's sane?" "Quite sane," White agreed absently. Camhorn grinned. "Then what's the matter, Lolly? Don't you like the idea of time-travel?" "Naturally not. It's an absurdity." "You're blunt, Lolly. And rash. A number of great minds differ with you about that." Laillard White said something rude about great minds in general. He went on, "Was the machine these Trelawneys built found intact?" Camhorn nodded. "In perfect condition. I found an opportunity to look it over when it and the others the Freeholders had concealed on Terra were brought in." "And these machines are designed to make it possible to move through time?" "No question about that. They function in Riemann space, and are very soundly constructed. A most creditable piece of work, in fact. It's only regrettable that the Trelawney brothers were wasted on it. We might have put their talents to better use. Though as it turned out...." He shrugged. White glanced over at him. "What are you talking about?" he asked suspiciously. "They didn't accomplish time-travel," Camhorn said, "though in theory they should have. I know it because we have several machines based on the same principles. The earliest was built almost eighty years ago. Two are now designed to utilize the YM thrust. The Trelawney machine is considerably more advanced in a number of details than its Overgovernment counterparts, but it still doesn't make it possible to move in time." "Why not?" "I'd like to know," Camhorn said. "The appearance of it is that the reality we live in takes the same dim view of time-travel that you do. Time-travel remains a theoretical possibility. But in practice--when, for example, the YM thrust is applied for that purpose--the thrust is diverted." White looked bewildered. "But if Paul Trelawney didn't move through time, what _did_ he do?" "What's left?" Camhorn asked. "He moved through space, of course." "Where?" Camhorn shrugged. "They penetrated Riemann space," he said, "after harnessing their machine to roughly nineteen thousand times the power that was available to us before the Ymir series of elements dropped into our hands. In theory, Lolly, they might have gone anywhere in the universe. If we'd had the unreasonable nerve to play around with multikilograms of YM--knowing what happened when fractional quantities of a gram were employed--we might have had a very similar experience." "I'm still just a little in the dark, you know," Laillard White observed drily, "as to what the experience consisted of."