I filed the remark, mentally, under unexpected compliments and said, “I love you, too, Uncle Otto.”

He must have sensed the sarcasm because he turned purple with rage and yelled, “Don’t be touchy. Be like me, patient, understanding, and easygoing, lumphead. Who says anything about you as a man? As a man, you are an honest dunderkopf, but as a lawyer, you have to be a crook. Everyone knows that.”

I sighed. The Bar Association warned me there would be days like this.

“What’s your new Effect, Uncle Otto?” I asked.

He said, “I can reach back into Time and bring things out of the past.”

I acted quickly. With my left hand I snatched my watch out of the lower left vest pocket and consulted it with all the anxiety I could work up. With my right hand I reached for the telephone.

“Well, Uncle,” I said heartily, “I just remembered an extremely important appointment I’m already hours late for. Always glad to see you. And now, I’m afraid I must say good-bye. Yes, sir, seeing you has been a pleasure, a real pleasure. Well, good-bye. Yes, sir -”

I failed to lift the telephone out of its cradle. I was pulling up all right, but my uncle Otto’s hand was on mine and pushing down. It was no contest. Have I said my uncle Otto was once on the Heidelberg wrestling team in ’32?

He took hold of my elbow gently (for him) and I was standing. It was a great saving of muscular effort (for me).

“Let’s” he said, “to my laboratory go.”

He to his laboratory went. And since I had neither the knife nor the inclination to cut my left arm off at the shoulder, I to his laboratory went also…

My uncle Otto’s laboratory is down a corridor and around a corner in one of the university buildings. Ever since the Schlemmelmayer Effect had turned out to be a big thing, he had been relieved of all course work and left entirely to himself. His laboratory looked it.

I said, “Don’t you keep the door locked anymore?”

He looked at me slyly, his huge nose wrinkling into a sniff. “It is locked. With a Schlemmelmayer relay, it’s locked. I think a word – and the door opens. Without it, nobody can get in. Not even the president of the university. Not even the janitor. ”

I got a little excited, “Great guns, Uncle Otto. A thought-lock could bring you -”

“Hah! I should sell the patent for someone else rich to get? After last night? Never. In a while, I will myself rich become.”

One thing about my uncle Otto. He’s not one of these fellows you have to argue and argue with before you can get him to see the light. You know in advance he’ll never see the light.

So I changed the subject. I said, “And the time machine?”

My uncle Otto is a foot taller than I am, thirty pounds heavier, and strong as an ox. When he puts his hands around my throat and shakes, I have to confine my own part in the conflict to turning blue.

I turned blue accordingly.

He said. “Ssh!”

I got the idea.

He let go and said, “Nobody knows about Project X.” He repeated, heavily, “Project X. You understand?”

I nodded. I couldn’t speak anyway with a larynx that was only slowly healing.

He said, “I do not ask you to take my word for it. I will for you a demonstration make.”

I tried to stay near the door.

He said, “Do you have a piece of paper with your own handwriting on it?”

I fumbled in my inner jacket pocket. I had notes for a possible brief for a possible client on some possible future day.

Uncle Otto said, “Don’t show it to me. Just tear it up. In little pieces tear it up and in this beaker the fragments put.”

I tore it into one hundred and twenty-eight pieces.

He considered them thoughtfully and began adjusting knobs on a – well, on a machine. It had a thick opal-glass slab attached to it that looked like a dentist’s tray.

There was a wait. He kept adjusting.

Then he said, “Aha!” and I made a sort of queer sound that doesn’t translate into letters.

About two inches above the glass tray there was what seemed to be a fuzzy piece of paper. It came into focus while I watched and – oh, well, why make a big thing out of it? It was my notes. My handwriting. Perfectly legible. Perfectly legitimate.

“Is it all right to touch it?” I was a little hoarse, partly out of astonishment and partly because of my uncle Otto’s gentle ways of enforcing secrecy.

“You can’t,” he said, and passed his hand through it. The paper remained behind, untouched. He said, “It’s only an image at one focus of a four-dimensional paraboloid. The other focus is at a point in time before you tore it up.”

I put my hand through it, too. I didn’t feel a thing.

“Now watch,” he said. He turned a knob on the machine and the image of the paper vanished. Then he took out a pinch of paper from the pile of scrap, dropped them in an ashtray, and set a match to it. He flushed the ash down the sink. He turned a knob again and the paper appeared, but with a difference. Ragged patches in it were missing.

“The burned pieces?” I asked.

“Exactly. The machine must trace in time along the hypervectors of the molecules on which it is focused. If certain molecules are in the air dispersed – pff-f-ft!”

I had an idea. “Suppose you just had the ash of a document.”

“Only those molecules would be traced back.”

“But they’d be so well distributed,” I pointed out, “that you could get a hazy picture of the entire document.”

“Hmm. Maybe.”

The idea became more exciting. “Well, then, look, Uncle Otto. Do you know how much police departments would pay for a machine like this. It would be a boon to the legal -”

I stopped. I didn’t like the way he was stiffening. I said, politely, “You were saying, Uncle?”

He was remarkably calm about it. He spoke in scarcely more than a shout. “Once and for all, nephew. All my inventions I will myself from now on develop. First I must some initial capital obtain. Capital from some source other than my ideas selling. After that, I will for my flutes a factory to manufacture open. That comes first. Afterward, afterward, with my profits I can time-vector machinery manufacture. But first my flutes. Before anything, my flutes. Last night, I so swore.

“Through selfishness of a few the world of great music is being deprived. Shall my name in history as a murderer go down? Shall the Schlemmelmayer Effect a way to fry men’s brains he? Or shall it beautiful music to mind bring? Great, wonderful, enduring music?”

He had a hand raised oracularly and the other behind his hack. The windows gave out a shrill hum as they vibrated to his words.

I said quickly, “Uncle Otto, they’ll hear you.”

“Then stop shouting,” he retorted.

“But look,” I protested, “how do you plan to get your initial capital, if you won’t exploit this machinery?”

“I haven’t told you. I can make an image real. What if the image is valuable?”

That did sound good. “You mean, like some lost document, manuscript, first edition – things like that?”

“Well, no. There’s a catch. Two catches. Three catches.”

I waited for him to stop counting, but three seemed the limit. “What are they?” I asked.

He said, “First, I must have the object in the present to focus on or I can’t locate it in the past.”

“You mean you can’t get anything that doesn’t exist right now where you can see it?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, catches two and three are purely academic. But what are they, anyway?”

“I can only remove about a gram of material from the past.”

A gram! A thirtieth of an ounce!

“What’s the matter? Not enough power?”

My uncle Otto said impatiently, “It’s an inverse exponential relationship. All the power in the universe more than maybe two grams couldn’t bring.”

This left things cloudy. I said, “The third catch?”