Heidkamp, immobile, watched the Master and seemed to guess at his thoughts. Only his eyes betrayed his exultation at the fury of the storm. Only a flicker of the lids, when he looked at the Master, shadowed forth a hatred of the man in whose war his only brother had fallen, the man who had negligently said to Heidkamp, "Well, give her to him, man! What's a brown-haired girl?" when the Master's current favorite had coveted Heidkamp's only daughter. The favorite was dead now, executed at one of the Master's whims, and the daughter too was dead, refusing to survive her shame and perishing by her own hand. But soon the torrent of rain ceased, the dancing fires vanished, and the lightning thinned and waned. The cloud was breaking under the impact of great rays that lashed out from below, boiling away in harmless beaten puffs, dissolving into the upper air or blowing north like fragments of a vanquished fleet. Belatedly the weather control operators had reasserted their mastery. Now the Master's fear changed to fury. As the visiscreen came on again, he shouted, "Intelligence Department, at once! Zadol, how did that storm get past our guard screens? Broke them with electric overload? Who calculated the safety factor? Have them executed at once! One of them a woman?--no matter. Put the execution on visiscreen where I can enjoy it. Ho, you Heidkamp, stand by and see the mildest penalty you technicians can expect when you fail me." On the visiscreen appeared the figures of the shrinking victims, instantly electrocuted by the Master's new device, which galvanized every separate cell of the human body into a tiny inferno. As the despot's petulant order was executed, he smiled, while the Guards stood impassive and the murmur of the drenched city drifted thru the broken sound screens. "Now, Technician Heidkamp, opener of windows and resurrector of the shattered and the dead, it is your task to prove to me that I saw the real past, not clever trickery. Burdened with the cares of the world, I have forgotten your theories. Explain." "With pleasure, your Excellency. Upon graduation from Midland Technical, I was assigned to vibro-chemical work with the London Archaeological Expedition. In block 44 south, Section 33, we excavated a partially demolished laboratory and library, in which we found records of extensive calculations and experiments by which one Dr. Louis Foster had demonstrated that time is spiral in nature, and that the loops of present and past are pressed so closely together that vision and travel from one to the other are theoretically possible. Foster published his findings in 1941, by which time his country was so deep in the agony of the War of the Wings that it was interested in nothing except military science. Dr. Foster had hoped to make a time travelling device to escape the rising tide of slaughter, but before he completed it, cellulate bombs put an end to him and his work."