move the lever. Your machine is remarkably simple in its construction and theory. I cannot understand why we have no record of successful time-travel."
"Ready?" Blake asked.
The dwarf, clutching the metal cylinder tightly, nodded. Blake moved the lever.
Instantly the dead blackness of the other dimension closed around him. Although he had expected the metamorphosis, he shuddered nevertheless.
"Nak!" he called. "Can you hear me?"
There was no sound. Blake extended a tentative hand, groping in the darkness. But he could not find the dwarf. As he hesitated he felt the bakelite lever move under his hand, snap back into its former position. Light blinded him.
And at that moment a curious darting pain went through Blake's head. He had an utterly indescribable feeling of change, as though some strange metamorphosis had taken place within him. Then it was gone.
He heard Jepson Norwood's voice finishing the sentence he had begun when the lever had been moved to fling Blake forward in time. The familiar walls of the laboratory were around him.
"the laws of nature. They can't be set aside, Ken. And you can see that the machine doesn't work—in the past or the future."
"I can't understand it," Blake heard himself saying. "It should work. Jep. But—it doesn't."
"I think I understand why you can't go into the past," Norwood said. "The past can't be changed, and you can't do an impossibility. You can't go back before you existed—or even back a few years or a few minutes, because if you could, you'd remember seeing yourself spring out of empty air on the Time Machine. And you haven't any such memory."
"But the future?" Blake asked. (The strange ache in his head—the odd feeling of something lost—was disappearing.) "Your argument doesn't apply there."
Norwood shook his head. "I don't know. But the universe has its laws, Ken—and they can't be broken."
"The law of compensation," Blake said softly, and then stared at Norwood. "I wonder—could it be possible that I have gone into the future—and can't remember it, simply because memories mere erased when I returned to a time-sector previous to the time when those memories were recorded on my brain? After all, one can't remember a thing before it's happened. Why"—his eyes were suddenly bright with interest—"I may have gone into the future, brought back someone with me—or tried to and failed, because he couldn't exist in a time prior to his birth! I've the most curious feeling that I have forgotten something—something vitally important"
And then Kenneth Blake shrugged and vaulted the rail of the Time Machine.
"Oh, it's rot, of course, Jep," he said, clapping Norwood affectionately on the shoulder. "It's too fantastic for belief. If I had gone into time I'd have remembered it. We've failed, that's all. Our theories were right, but they didn't work. There may be no such thing as time traveling, after all!"
