child sacrifice as a way of exonerating himself of the possibility that he accidentally started the fire which killed his daughter. When he sees his wife's reaction to the chronoscope, and realizes that she would use it to obsessively watch their daughter's short life, he alerts the authorities and accepts the blame. His associate, Foster, now in the grip of intellectual pride and zeal for the cause of free inquiry, attempts to publish his breakthrough but is suddenly and unexpectedly apprehended by Thaddeus Araman, the bureaucrat who rejected Potterley's original research request. As Araman attempts to secure a promise from Foster not to persist in publication, Foster's uncle, Nimmo, is brought in. Nimmo proves just as rebellious and intractable as the other two, and Araman, frustrated by their unwillingness to cooperate, has no alternative but to declare the government's hand. He reveals that Foster has been apprehended through the government's own use of the chronoscope in snooping on the plotters. Araman reveals that the government chronoscopy agency, far from suppressing scientific research out of blind authoritarianism, was trying to protect the people in the only way they knew how. As Foster and Potterley have learned, the chronoscope is inherently limited to recent times—but what if, instead of focusing it upon the past of a generation earlier, it were tuned to the past of one-hundredth of a second ago? The dead past, Araman says, is only a synonym for "the living present". If the plans for a chronoscope, particularly Foster's new and improved version, ever reached the general public, the resulting plague of voyeurism would effectively eliminate the concept of privacy. Even the government workers now assigned to the chronoscope, Araman says, sometimes transgress regulations and use it to spy for personal purposes. Nimmo then reveals that in an attempt to take the pressure off Foster, he has already sent the details of Foster's chronoscope to several of his regular publicity outlets. The details of how to build a chronoscope relatively easily and cheaply are now available to everyone. Araman is resigned to the exposure of the chronoscope, and leaves the three academics with the insightful line: "Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever. Arrest rescinded." Analysis The story's twist—that the man from the government really was there to help—qualifies the idea that a world of directed research really constitutes