“But--if the Professor will excuse the remark--it wouldn’t be any good if he did. I’ve read _The Time Machine_, and I know that space is curved, thanks to Einstein’s enterprising investigation. I quite understand that, if I got at the right distance from the earth (and my eyesight were good enough), I should see our Darwinian ancestor shinning up the tree-trunk for the fatal apple, but I don’t profess to follow these mysteries further. When I had to learn science, I always preferred the demonstrations. Now, if the Professor would project a pullet six months old backward, and it returned a chicken----” Young Danby laughed, and I saw Bryant’s eyes twinkle, but the Professor answered me patiently. “It is obviously impossible to project anything into the past, which is fixed irrevocably. “Otherwise there would be no finality, and the confusion would be intolerable. It requires no scientific training of intellect to understand that the ordered experience of life would become chaotic if, for instance, upon reading of a long-past murder, I could project myself into the past, and intervene to save the victim. “In such event the murder would both have occurred, and been prevented: which is absurd. “But the future is different. It is unformed, or, at least, its facts are in a condition of fluidity. We are all occupied in forming them. If I kill an insect, I do not destroy it only, but its descendants also. I also influence the lives of other insects with which they would have mated, and which will form other alliances. From such alliances other insects will be born which would not have existed. The present consequences of any action, even the most momentous, are trivial, because the present is but a moment. Its future consequences are incalculably greater, because the future is infinite. “Realising this, we recognise that our present actions belong to the future almost entirely, and it becomes a less important possibility that we may be able to project ourselves forward into some future period, and influence its circumstances by the physical methods with which we are familiar here.” I don’t suppose the Professor had finished, but he paused for breath for a second, and I took the chance he offered. “I’m sorry I came a cropper over the pullet plan. And, anyway, there wasn’t much sense in it. It would be too unprofitable to become popular. But why not get the chickens, and project them forward? Nine months ahead, say, and they come back cackling, with the first egg on the table?--‘Professor Danby, the Magic Poulterer.’ There’s a fortune there, anyway.” For the first time the Professor showed distinct signs of irritation. “You may not be a scientist,” he said, “but as a business man you must know that you are talking nonsense. Would you send your chickens into the future without a hen to brood them?