jecting your daughter to involuntary time travel by sending her a mirror?" He laughed harshly, smoothed his sleek black hair. Then continued:
"Yes, professor. Go to the police. Tell them all about my hideous crimes." Again he laughed. "See how long it takes them to put you under psychiatric observation."
The aged scientist's lips quivered with passion and despair.
"Why do you stay?" he cried. "You have won. Why do you mock us? Go away! Let us alone!"
"Oh, no." The other shook his head. "I don't want to leave just yet, professor. There are still some things I have to tell you. Things I learned while making preparations for Elaine's little trip."
He paused to gloat.
"How thoroughly have you investigated the case of that first Elaine Duchard, in whose body your daughter now resides, Professor Duchard?" he demanded.
The white-haired savant did not even answer. He leaned weakly against a laboratory bench, a broken man.
"Did you know, for instance," Adrian Vance continued, "that Baron Morriere's men tortured Elaine Duchard before they murdered her?"
"You fiend! Not even a savage would do a thing like that!"
Vance chuckled evilly.
"You exaggerate," he sneered. "Besides, Elaine's sweetheart, here"—he prodded the still-prone Mark with his foot—"no doubt will protect her."
His face darkened.
"And if you did not want harm to befall her, why did you let her reject me when I asked to marry her? I gave her her chance. When she didn't take it, what else could she expect but my revenge?"
"Go away. Please go away."
O{{uc|n{{ the floor, Mark stirred uneasily.
His brain was clear now, though his head throbbed like a jungle tom-tom under the beat of a mad witch doctor. Slowly, he tried his muscles. Tensed them. Relaxed them. Tested them for complete control.
Vance said:
"In case you still have any notions of rescuing your daughter from the far reaches of time, professor, forget them now. It's impossible to call a person back. In the first place, a time mirror would be needed—and the only one in existence, the one I bought from a French sorcerer who once studied under Eliphas Levi, now stands on that easel in the corner."
Sobs racked the other's frail form. He still leaned against the bench, his face buried in his hands.
But on the floor, Mark Carter's jaw grew hard. He readied himself for a savage leap.
"Furthermore," their captor went on, "your precious Elaine remembers nothing of her life in this century. For all practical purposes she has become the first Elaine Duchard. I know this, because I tried out the mirror by sending one of my clerks three months into the past. He was possessed by a strange amnesia that left his mind a perfect blank so far as what had happened in those three months was concerned!"
The antiquarian paused, savoring the full effect of his words on Elaine's father with evil glee. His black eyes were shining with hell's own fire.
And in that tense, silent second, Mark Carter struck.
He came off the floor like a tiger springing, and the roar of a jungle beast was in his throat. His arms shot out to embrace Adrian Vance's legs and pull
