"Tell me what time is," said Harrigan one late summer afternoon in a
Madison Street bar. "I'd like to know."

"A dimension," I answered. "Everybody knows that."

"All right, granted. I know space is a dimension and you can move
forward or back in space. And, of course, you keep on aging all the
time."

"Elementary," I said.

"But what happens if you can move backward or forward in time? Do you
age or get younger, or do you keep the status quo?"

"I'm not an authority on time, Tex. Do you know anyone who traveled in
time?"

Harrigan shrugged aside my question. "That was the thing I couldn't get
out of Vanderkamp, either. He presumed to know everything else."

"Vanderkamp?"

"He was another of those strange people a reporter always runs into.
Lived in New York--downtown, near the Bowery. Man of about forty, I'd
say, but a little on the old-fashioned side. Dutch background, and
hipped on the subject of New Amsterdam, which, in case you don't know,
was the original name of New York City."

"Don't mind my interrupting," I cut in. "But I'm not quite straight on
what Vanderkamp has to do with time as dimension."

"Oh, he was touched on the subject. He claimed to travel in it. The fact
is, he invented a time-traveling machine."

"You certainly meet the whacks, Tex!"

"Don't I!" He grinned appreciatively and leaned reminiscently over the
bar. "But Vanderkamp had the wildest dreams of the lot. And in the end
he managed the neatest conjuring trick of them all. I was on the
Brooklyn _Enterprise_ at that time; I spent about a year there. Special
features, though I was on a reporter's salary. Vanderkamp was something
of a local celebrity in a minor way; he wrote articles on the early
Dutch in New York, the nomenclature of the Dutch, the history of Dutch
place-names, and the like. He was handy with a pen, and even handier
with tools. He was an amateur electrician, carpenter, house-painter, and
claimed to be an expert in genealogy."

"And he built a time-traveling machine?"

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