I could see it all as plain as day. Declining business, increasing unemployment, heavier taxation to help the unemployed and buy back prosperity, property owners unable to pay those taxes. A vicious circle.

Herb was rummaging around back in the dimness by the filing cabinet. Presently he came out into the light again, all covered with dust.

'They're only twenty or thirty years of files,' he said, 'and we got the newest one. But I found something else. Back behind the cabinet. Guess it must have fallen back there and nobody ever bothered to clean it out.'

He handed it to me – an old and crumpled paper, so brittle with age I was afraid it might crumble to dust in my very hands.

'There was quite a bit of rubble back of the cabinet,' said Herb. 'Some other papers. Old, too, but this one was the oldest.'

I looked at the date. April 16, 1985.

That yellowed paper was almost five hundred years old! It had come off the press less than thirty-five years after Herb and I had taken off with the time machine!

Lying behind the filing cabinet all those years. The cabinet was large and heavy to move, and janitors in newspaper offices aren't noted for outstanding tidiness.

But there was something bothering me. A little whisper way back in my head, somewhere down at the base of my brain, that kept telling me there was something I should remember.

I tossed the old paper on a desk and walked to a window. Most of the glass was broken out, and what wasn't broken out was coated so thick with grime you couldn't see through it. I looked out through the place where there wasn't any glass.

There the city lay – almost as I remembered it. There was Jackson's tower, the tallest in the city back in 1950, but now dwarfed by three or four others. The spire of the old cathedral was gone, and I missed that, for it had been a pretty thing. I used to sit and watch it from this very window through the mist of early-spring rain or through the ghostly white of the winter's first snowfall. I missed the spire, but Jackson's tower was there, and so were a lot of other buildings I could place.