So that was that. We took time off to recuperate. Some hours later we were standing in the _Saturn_ before a large, cylindrical, glass-walled machine, Lancelot Biggs' "time-travel" gadget which had absorbed us up here into the future. That is most of us were still standing here in the _Saturn_. Professor Hallowell had already been projected back to our time. So had Travis Tomkins, Midland's observatory expert, his arms loaded with books from the ship's library describing the great inventions of, as on the _Saturn_, the last two centuries--or, to us of 1940, the inventions of the _next_ two hundred years. "Which books," commented Lancelot Biggs wryly, "will do Tomkins a lot of good--I don't think! They won't arrive with him, you know--because in his time they weren't even written! I hope both those fellows will return to their original places on Earth. Rather amazing, wouldn't it be," he chuckled, "if something went wrong with the machine and Hallowell appeared suddenly on the campus of Midland University with some gadget from the future--_his_ future--which fell into his pocket in his transit through space and time!" "Campus?" exclaimed H. Logan MacDowell. "Don't tell me that time-travel thing of yours will actually set us down again in our own time!" "If it doesn't," grinned Lancelot Biggs, "a lot of faces are going to be very red indeed." He motioned to the second mate, Lt. Dick Todd. Todd set himself at the controls. Then he nodded to the detective. With unseemly haste the gumshoe scrambled into the time machine. "Contact!" Biggs ordered. The second mate pressed the button that sent the snooper back to Midland campus. That lug! I don't think he ever did figure out what it was all about! In fact a week later, when I met him skulking along a corridor, I asked him how he liked his round trip through space. "I'm trying not to think about it," he groaned. "Confidentially, in another ten days I'll be able to believe it never happened _a_-tall, no sir!" "Brother," I said to myself, "if imagination was a baby chick, you couldn't scratch yourself out of an egg-shell." But I'm getting ahead of the story. After we got rid of the gumshoe, there was Prexy H. Logan MacDowell to be considered. "You are next, sir," Lancelot Biggs said courteously. "And a pleasant journey." "Harrumph!" growled his academic nibs. "This is a damnable outrage!" * * * * * Biggs bowed him into the time-traveling contraption. "I think you've got something there," he grinned--and signalled to Dick Todd. One second later H. Logan was flitting through space back home. And now it was time for last farewells. But Biggs asked, in gripping Hank's hand, the question I'd been dying to ask myself, but hadn't dared. "You should tell me, Hank, how you struck on the solution. We may get in a jam like that again, some day. And if we do--"