Slim locked the door after Ellingbery, and I took off my pants and set up the ironing-board on the desk. Slim went back to adjust the dials on his machine.

“This gadget is a sort of super-sensitive radar,” he said as it warmed up. “I can tune it to your brainwaves and pick you up anywhere within forty miles or three months.”

A purple indicator began to wink. “It proves I’ve got brains, anyway,” I pointed out.

“Yes, your waves come in at a frequency of approximately 1,832,956,000. That’s as close as I can tune it so far, but that’s plenty close enough. There are other characteristics, such as power and damping and height of crest and so on, that make it selective enough to pick out any one person in the United States if it could reach that far.”

“And then you can see everything I do?”

“No, I can see only what you see with your own eyes.”

Then I must have been staring at the blonde. I held my breath when I asked, “Can you tell what I’m thinking?”

“No.”

I breathed again.

“I can translate what you say into language, though. Something happens when I throw two hundred and twenty volts into this bank of tubes. As near as I can figure, it creates a ‘time-warp’⁠—which doesn’t mean much of anything objectively. I don’t know how it works; I couldn’t even duplicate it. I suppose some high-powered electronics engineer could figure it out, but I don’t want anybody but you and me even to know about it. What I’m interested in is what we can do with it.”