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foreboding, even sinister quality in Stephenson that occasionally had manifested itself in the form of a brief, violent outburst. He recalled once when he’d watched Stephenson play for an unprecedented third straight handball championship at the university. Hard pressed to win, Stephenson had maneuvered his challenger into a corner, then slammed the ball so
that it ricocheted off the center wall and into the man’s face. Victorious, Stephenson had stormed off the court without an apology or even the traditional handshake. At the time H.G. had attributed the act to the frustrations and pressures of a student preparing himself for a career as a surgeon, not realizing until now the full and horrible import of his speculation.
    It suddenly occurred to H.G. that the handball incident had happened in the spring of 1884 when he was finishing his first year at the university and Stephenson his last. Obviously, then, the 1888 murders had taken place when Stephenson was a student at the Cambridge medical school. If only H.G. had known then what he knew now. But why? What had possessed Stephenson? What kind of hideous demon ruled the inner recesses of his mind? H.G. did not have a clue.
    More urgent thoughts came to mind. Was Stephenson still in the house? If so, where? How could the police have missed him? Their search had taken well over an hour and no doubt had been very thorough. True, Stephenson could have left with the others, but he never would have gotten past Duggan without his cape and bag. Maybe he had, however. Maybe he had left the cape and bag because he obviously didn’t want them searched. No, the logic was all wrong. H.G. had been at the front door with the detective the entire time. Stephenson had not been there. He had not been searched and he had not said his good-byes. In the confusion and excitement, he had apparently not been missed. If he had left the house, he had done so by another exit.
    H.G. slapped his hand to his forehead. Great Scott, what had taken him so long to figure it out?
    He raced down the hall to the small door that led to the back stairs. He opened it and hurried down into the basement. He saw that the door to his laboratory had been broken into and was now slightly ajar. The yellow glow of an incandescent lamp shone through.
Had he forgotten to turn the light off? No. The electric light bulb was too new and precious to be ignored.
    He slowly crossed to the door and pushed it the rest of the way open. There was no one in the laboratory. His eyes narrowed. Stephenson was definitely gone, and he had left in a most unconventional manner.
    The time machine was carrying its first passenger.

3
    The time machine sat in the center of the laboratory, a faint bluish glow emanating from it that soon died away. To an objective eye, the device probably would have seemed squat, ugly and askew, but to its creator it was a thing of beauty.
    The cabin was square and stood eight feet high. It was constructed out of heavy steel plates which were held together by rivets and bolts. The sides of the machine were tapered to facilitate rotating through the fourth dimension. Small, paned windows were built in all around so that the passenger could see what historical event he might be getting into at low-velocity manual operation. Of course, at a cruising speed of two years per minute, the outside world would appear as nothing more than a blur of colored molecules as the device slipped through time in a vaporized state.
    Beneath the cabin and extending three feet into the ground was the engine. Most of the parts were precisely machined stainless steel, but here and there nickel and ivory glistened alongside buffers of industrial diamonds.
    The heart of the device was the arrangement of twisted crystalline bars which worked to juxtapose, concentrate and swirl the electromagnetic fields of energy, enabling the machine to spin out of and into time spheres.

    Inside the cabin were the controls, which could