 What was surprising to Jerome about the papers that were retrieved with the generator?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1951. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt my story. Yes, it'll be pretty obvious it must be a time machine. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you, and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man who put atomic power in every home. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it to you, and I still can't help answering when you speak. "Maybe it's no dimension—or it might be the fifth; if you're going to skip over the so-called fourth without traveling along it, you'd need a fifth. There may have been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first, then the time-machine. I figured out once that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space dimensions. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer. That means you either carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small increment of time from the main field. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss. You still feel gravity, but I can't explain that, either. You feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement floor around. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an interstellar civilization." We have to walk up a flight of stairs, and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open. It gives out a coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the future. Some of them can be decoded to stationery shops, fountains, and the like. But there is only a single picture of a dull-looking metal sphere, with passengers moving up a ramp, and the office is closed.
 They were all in his own handwriting.
 They were all in his own handwriting.  They were copies of what he already had at home.  They were exact duplicates for what the futuristic Jerome had brought when he visited.  They were forged.