In my century and in my life, these things happened in June and July of a year ago. It’s just about twenty-two months since Joe and I got Professor Hadley’s gadget rebuilt and moved a safe distance away from it before we turned it on. But that device carried me into the thirty-fourth century, where Ginny was waiting interestedly to meet me because she’d read this letter. But twenty-two months ago I had not written it. Yet if you’re to act in your typically impulsive way—and if Ginny is to regard me with the bright and fascinated eyes of a girl looking at the man she knows she’s going to marry—I have to write it some time, don’t I? So the things that have happened will take place?

Now let’s talk about Professor Hadley’s time-transporter instead. Shall we?

It was remarkably complicated to look at. There were coils and electron tubes. There were inductances, grid leaks and transistors, with dials, rheostats, feedbacks and assorted hardware. I didn’t understand it, and even Joe grew more and more pained as we replaced one after another of the burned-out wires and condensers and whatnots, and it made progressively less sense to him. He knew his books, did Joe, but this was something else. Still, we got it rebuilt, and I could swear that it was exactly the way Professor Hadley’d had it put together, except with heavier wiring.

The Professor must have been pretty bright. He’d been absolutely sure the thing would demonstrate the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction, but it was much more remarkable than that. It was a time-transporter, moving objects from one temporal frame of reference to another.

Every scientist in history has said that can’t be done. I hope the Professor, wherever he is—in the Upper Devonian or Jurassic or even the Lower Cretacious period—knows of his accidental triumph.