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to give you a very inadequate layman’s explanation.”
    â€œYou say,” said the Secretary of State, “that you are transporting yourselves through time back to the present moment. May I ask how many of you intend to make the trip?”
    â€œUnder ideal circumstances, Mr. Williams, I would hope all of us.”
    â€œYou mean your entire population? Your intention is to leave your world of 2498 empty of any human beings?”
    â€œThat, sir, is our heartfelt hope.”
    â€œAnd how many of you are there?”
    â€œGive or take a few thousand, two billion of us. Our population, as you will note, is somewhat less than yours at the present moment and later I will explain why this.…”
    â€œBut why?” asked the Attorney General. “Why did you do this? You must know that the world’s economy cannot support both your population and our own. Here in the United States, perhaps in a few of the more favored countries of the world, the situation can be coped with for a limited period of time. We can, as a matter of utmost urgency, shelter you and feed you, although it will strain even our resources. But there are other areas of the Earth that could not do this, even for a week.”
    â€œWe are well aware of that,” said Maynard Gale. “We are trying to make certain provisions to alleviate the situation. In India, in China, in some African and South American areas we are sending back in time not only people, but wheat and other food supplies, in the hope that whatever we can send through may help. We know how inadequate these provisions will be. And we know as well the stress which we place upon all the people of this time. You must believe me when I say we did not arrive at our decision lightly.”
    â€œI would hope not,” said the President, somewhat tartly.
    â€œI think,” said Gale, “that in your time you may have taken note of published speculations about whether or not there are other intelligences in the universe, with the almost unanimous conclusion that there must surely be. Which raises the subsidiary question of why, if this is so, none of these intelligences has sought us out, why we’ve not been visited. The answer to this, of course, is that space is vast and the distances between stars are great and that our solar system lies far out in one of the galactic arms, far from the greater star density in the galactic core, where intelligence might have risen first. And then there is the speculation concerning what kind of people, if you want to call them that, might come visiting if they should happen to do so. Here I think the overwhelming, although by no means unanimous, body of opinion is that by the time a race had developed star-roving capability they would have arrived at a point of social and ethical development where they would pose no threat.
    â€œAnd while this may be true enough, there would always be exceptions and we, it seems, up in our own time, have become the victims of one of these exceptions.”
    â€œWhat you are saying,” said Sandburg, “is that you have been visited, with what appear to have been unhappy results. Is that why you sent ahead the warning about the planting of artillery?”
    â€œYou haven’t done that yet? From the tone of your voice.…”
    â€œThere has not been the time.”
    â€œSir, I plead with you. We discussed the possibility that some of them might break through the defenses we set up and invade the tunnels. We have strong defenses, of course, and there are strict orders, which will be carried out by devoted men, to destroy any tunnel where this might happen, but there always is the chance that something could go wrong.”
    â€œBut your warning was so indefinite. How will we know if something.…”
    â€œYou would know,” said Gale. “There would be no doubt at all. Take a cross between a grizzly bear and a tiger, elephant size. Let it move so