"How should I know?" I retorted. "Probably has."
"That is nearly all. I found a doorway leading to a dark room. I crawled through it toward a glow of light. I passed through another room. I thought I was in a nightmare, and that this was my home. I remembered that the cage had not moved. It had hardly lurched. Just trembled; vibrated.
"But this was not my home. The rooms were small and dark. Then I peered through a window on a strange stone street. And saw these strange-looking young men. And that is all--all I can tell you."
She had evidently held herself calm by a desperate effort. She broke down now, sobbing without restraint.
The portals of this mystery had swung wide to receive us. The tumbling events which menaced all our world of 1935 were upon us now. A maelstrom. A torrent in the midst of which we were caught up like tiny bits of cork and whirled away.
But we thought we understood the mystery. We believed we were acting for the best. What we did was no doubt ill-considered; but the human mind is so far from omniscient! And this thing was so strange!
Alten said, "You have a right to be overwrought, Mistress Mary Atwood. But this thing is as strange to us as it is to you. I called that iron monster a Robot. But it does not belong to our age: if it does I have never seen one such as you describe. And traveling through Time--"
He smiled down at her. "That is not a commonplace everyday occurrence to us, I assure you. The difference is that in this world of ours we can understand--or at least explain--these things as being scientific. And so they have not the terror of the supernatural."
Mary was calmer now. She returned his smile. "I realize that; or at least I am trying to realize it."
What a level-headed girl was this! I touched her arm. "You are very wonderful--"
Alten brushed me away. "Let's try and reduce it to rationality. The cage was--is, I should say, since of course it still exists--that cage is a Time-traveling vehicle. It is traveling back and forth through Time, operated by a Robot. Call it that. A pseudo-human monster fashioned of metal in the guise of a man."
Even Alten had to force himself to speak calmly, as he gazed from one to the other of us. "It came, no doubt from some future age, where half-human mechanisms are common, and Time-traveling is known. That cage probably does not travel in Space, but only in Time. In the future--somewhere--the Space of that house on Patton Place may be the laboratory of a famous scientist. And in the past--in the year 1777--that same Space was the garden of Mistress Atwood's home. So much is obvious. But why--"