I was silent, pondering the things he had said. But I felt the question in his eyes, and sensed his appeal before he voiced it. "And you, Wheeler, will you help me? Together we can do this, can find this secret of time-traveling and go after Cannell, follow him as he cried for me to do. I know that he was not your close friend, as he was mine, but I am asking you to help, nevertheless, for you are the only one I can go to for aid. Who would credit the thing we saw, if I told it? But you saw, and you know, you understand. And if we could work on this together--" Without replying, I stepped to the window and looked out, inwardly struggling for an answer. While we talked, night had fallen, and again the brilliant lights of the city had blossomed, like burgeoning flowers of flame. A day had passed since we had seen Cannell seized, from this same window. Just twenty-four hours! I must have spoken my thought aloud, for Lantin, who had come up and was standing beside me, repeated it. "Just twenty-four hours--to us, Wheeler. But how long to Cannell, I wonder? Where is he tonight, do you think; what thousands, what tens of thousands of years ahead? And wondering if we will come after him, if we will save him--" He stopped, but the thought persisted. Where _was_ Cannell, now? Caught in some web of utter evil, far in the future, some unholy lair of that hellish thing, the Raider? I remembered the fear on Cannell's face, the fear in my own heart when the Raider had flashed down on us. Could I venture against such a creature, even though we found the way to cross time? Would I dare to pit myself against a being like that? There at the window I battled my own fear, and when I finally turned, it was to extend my hand to Lantin. "I'm with you," I told him shortly; "if we can discover the secret of the Raider's power, we'll follow Cannell--into time!" _CHAPTER 5_ THE BUILDING OF THE TIME-CAR It is not my intention to relate here the details of the work that occupied our attention in the following weeks. It has been dealt with at length in two technical treatises by Lantin and myself. The theoretical side of our work has been very fully discussed in those two books, but the concrete details are purposely slurred over. The most valuable part of our achievement, the time-wave itself, is hardly mentioned in them. There is a reason for this, and that reason is the firm intention of Dr. Lantin and myself not to impart any information that would enable anyone to duplicate our own experiment. Thus it is of necessity that parts of this present record are vague and indefinite.