The Seeds of Time

I can’t remember what we spoke of first. I suppose I was just too excited and bewildered to take it in. I do recall learning her name, and thinking it rather a mouthful Clytassamine.

I have a recollection of her speaking in her uncertain, foreign English, and of wondering how it came about that there could be a language problem at the gates of Paradise, but I was more concerned with myself. I threw back the coverlet, and found that I was naked beneath it. That didn’t worry me, nor apparently her. I sat staring at the legs. They weren’t mine. Now I came to look at it, the hand with which I felt them was not mine, either-but I could wriggle the toes and bend the fingers. I swung the legs over the side of the couch, and then I stood on them-for the first time in more than four years, I stood….

I am not going into a lot of detail. I have a nasty feeling that what I might say would be about as informative as a Trobriand Islander’s first impressions of New York. I just had to take most things on trust, the way he would.

There was a dressing machine. Clytassamine operated it someway, and the product came out of a slot in the wall. There was a whale of a lot of it, and not a seam to be seen. Pretty filmy and sissy, it seemed to me, but it satisfied her, so I let her help me put it on. When I was fixed she led the way out of the room. We emerged into a great hall built of the same green composition. I reckoned that if Manhattan were to sink into the Hudson, Grand Central Station might look a bit the way this place did.

There was a number of people about, none of them hurrying. All their clothes were of the filmy stuff, and all voluminous, but as far as colour and design went, it was apparently each to his own taste. To my unaccustomed eye all this swirling of draperies suggested a stately and somewhat decadent ballet. Our slippers were silent on the floor.

There was scarcely a sound other than the hum of quiet voices which rose and dispersed in the huge place without echo. To a stranger this deadening of sound felt oppressive. Clytassamine led the way to a row of double seats set against a wall, and pointed to the end one. I sat in it, and she beside me. It rose a little, perhaps four inches, from the floor, and began to drift across the room. In the middle we turned and slid silently towards a great arch at the far end.

Once outside we rose a little more until we had an elevation of about one yard above ground level. From the shallow platform to which the chair was attached a curved windscreen rose to cover us, and while I was still puzzling how such a thing could be contrived we speeded up to some twenty-five miles an hour, and swept out smoothly across park-like country, navigating a course between occasional trees and clumps of bushes. I supposed that she was controlling the contraption in some way, though I could not see how. I had to admit right off that in everything except speed it was a sweeter flying machine than any other I’ve known-more in the magic-carpet class.

It was a strange journey. Something over an hour, I imagine, and in all that time we never crossed nor even saw a road, though twice I noticed footpaths which looked little used. We sped through country which seemed to be an unending eighteenth-century park with never a cultivated field or garden. To help the illusion there were occasional herds of deer-like creatures which paid us no attention. The only signs of human existence were a few large buildings to be seen above the trees, but none of them on our course. Threading our way across the landscape was an eery sensation.

It took me a while to get used to it. Every time I saw a wood ahead I tried to pull back on a non-existent stick and hop over it, but apparently the contrivance didn’t work that way, for we always went round.

After half an hour or so I began to catch glimpses of a building on a hill ahead of us. I’m no architect, and I can’t describe it, but it was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined because every building I knew was based on some geometrical figure: this looked more as if it had grown. The walls were pearly, and without window openings.

Bushes grew close up against it, and some were even sprouting on top of it. The only reason I was sure it was a building was because it couldn’t be anything natural. I began to keep on looking for it as we got nearer, and with each new glimpse I was more astonished. I could see now that what I had thought to be small bushes were full-grown trees, even those on top of it. The thing was unbelievably immense. Then, in the midst of my amazement, I remembered myself, and smiled-the dope dream was running true to form: