Fantasy

Now my children! You wish to remake each other? Julie, you want your lover transformed into a more tender companion? And you Leander, you would rather that your Julie had a more aggressive bearing?

Ah, poor man, Rip Van Winkle was his name, but it's twenty years since he went away from home with his gun, and never has been heard of since,—

It must suffice then to say that, at the point where I come again into perfect possession of my consciousness, the venerable monk and I were conferring, in an easy manner, upon various points connected with his age, or with mine, and both of us having a clear understanding, and perfect recollection of the fact, that, at this same moment, he was actually living in the eighth century, and I as truly in the nineteenth; nor did this trifing difference of a thousand years or more—this break, as geologists would call it—this fault in the strata of time—perplex either of us a whit; any more than two friends are molested by the circumstance of their happening to encounter each other just as they arrive from opposite hemispheres.

If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.

Busied in this, I walked on for several hours, during which the mist deepened around me to so great an extent that at length I was reduced to an absolute groping of the way. And now an indescribable uneasiness possessed me—

For you allow that, while ghosts out of the future are unheard of, ghosts from the past are not infrequently encountered.

In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigour for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay.

On dirait que l’air invisible est plein d’inconnaissables Puissances dont nous subissons le voisinage mystérieux.

translate

One might almost say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure.

“It goes, of course, at the usual rate. Only the time has to go with it. Hence, if I move the hands, I change the time. To move them forwards, in advance of the true time, is impossible: but I can move them as much as a month backwards—that is the limit. And then you have the events all over again—with any alterations experience may suggest.”

“What a blessing such a watch would be,” I thought, “in real life! To be able to unsay some heedless word—to undo some reckless deed! Might I see the thing done?”

“With pleasure!” said the good natured Professor. “When I move this hand back to here,” pointing out the place, “History goes back fifteen minutes!”

After a while turkeys got to be awfully scarce, selling for about a thousand dollars apiece. They got to passing off almost anything for turkeys—even half-grown hummingbirds. And cranberries—well they asked a diamond apiece for cranberries. All the woods and orchards were cut down for Christmas trees. After a while they had to make Christmas trees out of rags. But there were plenty of rags, because people got so poor, buying presents for one another, that they couldn't get any new clothes, and they just wore their old ones to tatters. They got so poor that everybody had to go to the poorhouse, except the confectioners, and the storekeepers, and the book-sellers, and they all got so rich and proud that they would hardly wait upon a person when he came to buy. It was perfectly shameful!

It seemed awful, and impossible, but the little green door led into the past, and Letitia Hopkins was visiting her great-great-great-grandfather and grandmother, great-great-grandmother, and her great-great-aunts.

Suddenly a splendid hound dashed out of the mist in front, followed by another and another until half-a-dozen or more were bounding and leaping around the girl beside me. She caressed and quieted them with her gloved hand, speaking to them in quaint terms which I remembered to have seen in old French manuscripts.

A thought seized me that by virtue of the powder I had grown backward through all the lifetimes of men, and was alone on the island with nothing but the brutes and the birds.

I pardon your ignorance concerning many matters of this Northland, for you are a young man and have travelled little; but, at the same time, I am inclined to agree with you on one thing. The mammoth no longer exists. How do I know? I killed the last one with my own right arm.

Scene II
Marley’s Ghost
shows Scrooge Visions of himself in
christmasses past

Don’t you understand? The thing existed in the Past. If you were in the Past, too, you could find it. It’s very difficult to make you understand things. Time and space are only forms of thought.

Wanted—A party of courageous men, experts in the various trades, to accompany a philanthropic gentleman on a mission of enlightenment to the Middle Ages. Single men only. References exchanged. An opportunity offers to construct anew the history of several benighted nations. If interested, call or write. Percival Tapscott, No. 198 Forty-Third Street.

‘But you said that all the fair—People of the Hills had left England.’

‘So they have; but I told you that you should come and go and look and know, didn’t I? The knight isn’t a fairy. He’s Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a very old friend of mine. He came over with William the Conqueror, and he wants to see you particularly.’

Oh, dear Aunt Harriet! It isn’t sudden—really not! We’ve been engaged three hundred years!

He was very happy. There seemed somehow to be more room in this new life than in the old one, and more time. No one was in a hurry, and there was not another house within a quarter of a mile. All green fields. Also he was a person of consequence. The servants called him “Master Richard,” and he felt, as he heard them, that being called Master Richard meant not only that the servants respected him as their master’s son, but that he was somebody from whom great things were expected. That he had duties of kindness and protection to the servants; that he was expected to grow up brave and noble and generous and unselfish, to care for those who called him master. He felt now very fully, what he had felt vaguely and dimly at Talbot Court, that he was not the sort of person who ought to do anything mean and dishonorable, such as being a burglar, and climbing in at pantry windows; that when he grew up he would be expected to look after his servants and laborers, and all the men and women whom he would have under him—that their happiness and well-being would be his charge. And the thought swelled his heart, and it seemed that he was born to a great destiny. He—little lame Dickie Harding of Deptford—he would hold these people’s lives in his hand. Well, he knew what poor people wanted; he had been poor—or he had dreamed that he was poor—it was all the same. Dreams and real life were so very much alike.

Hear, Oh badge of Arden’s house,
The spell my little age allows;
Arden speaks it without fear,
Badge of Arden’s house, draw near,
Make me brave and kind and wise,
And show me where the treasure lies.

Through into a little room whose narrow window showed the blue day-lit sky—a room with not much in it but a bed, a carved stool, and a boy of his own age, dressed in the kind of dress you see in the pictures of the little sons of Charles the First.

‘Ah—well! There have been worse men than Nick Culpeper to take lessons from. Now, where can we sit that’s not indoors?’

‘In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,’ Dan suggested. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

“Where you doin?” he asked, quite as though he had been accustomed to meeting old clocks on the stairs.

“I’m bound for yes-ter-day,” the clock replied. “Want to go to yes-ter-day?”

Listen. We’re His Majesty’s destroyer Seapink, out of Devonport last October, and nothing particular the matter with us. Now who are you?

He paused, looking at my cigarette case, which he had taken into his hand again. He smiled at some recollection or other, and it was a minute or so before he continued.

Yes, Dejah Thoris, I too am a prisoner; my name is John Carter, and I claim Virginia, one of the United States of America, Earth, as my home; but why I am permitted to wear arms I do not know, nor was I aware that my regalia was that of a chieftain.

He had been an eavesdropper, and had come upon private information of a secret kind that he had no right to make use of, even that good might come—even to save life.

We are atoms in two oceans, time and space. Walk from here to the forest yonder, and your corporal self passes through a portion of space. Each moment you live you pass through a portion of the ocean of time. But the progression is only one way—for the corporal body. With the spirit it is different. Time has no boundaries for it. Out of the infinite, into the infinite, it comes and it goes. It is one with the Eternal. Therein Moses was right.

A hundred years hence! Think of it! If I could come back to life THEN—just for a few hours—and go to the reading-room and READ! Or, better still, if I could be projected now, at this moment, into that future, into that reading-room, just for this one afternoon! I'd sell myself body and soul to the Devil for that!

He clung to his gravity, which somehow steadied him—so odd it was that the sense of her understanding wouldn’t be abated, which even a particular lapse, he could see. . .

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

He that taketh this crystal, so, in his hand, at night, and wishes, saying ‘At a certain hour let it be’; the hour comes and he will go back eight, ten, even twelve years if he will, into the past, and do a thing again, or act otherwise than he did. The day passes; the ten years are accomplished once again; he is here once more; but he is what he might have become had he done that one thing otherwise.

Lord, it is an Ambassador from Witchland and his train. He craveth present audience."

A cat can’t live nowadays—turn me back to a better age, just for a day.

I know I love you, Ken! But today—during the marriage service—something seemed to reach out of the Past that made me—afraid!

Sir Arthur Strangways: Only a trifle. I wish to see a file of the Times.
Hahalaba:For what year?

You see, it’s all right, uncle, when I’m sure! Then we go strong for all we’re worth. Don’t we, Bassett?

[The same room, at the same time, on the same day, in 1928. Most of the furniture remains, but the tone of time has settled upon it, and there are some changes.]

How’s this? We throw a modern section into the picture. The hero’s a young hoofer in a Broadway show, right? Now he sings and he dances, right? But one night backstage, he’s reading A Tale of Two Cities, in between numbers, see? And a sandbag falls and hits him on the head, and he dreams he’s back during the French Revolution, right? Well, this way we get in the modern dancing numbers—♫Charleston, Charleston♫—but in the dream part, we can still use the costume stuff!

A dazzling streak of lightning, a mighty clap of thunder, and Paul Feron, suddenly awakened, sprang to his feet with white face and staring eyes. What had happened? God, what had happened?

♫ I hate to think what might have been if we had never met . . . ♫ —lyric from “Here We Are” written by Gus Kahn [lyrics] and Harry Warren [music]

Is there a part of the Pacific that extends beyond time and space—an oceanic limbo into which, by some unknowable cataclysm, that island passed in a bygone period, even as Lemuria sank beneath the wave? And if so, by what abrogation of dimensional laws was I enabled to reach the island and depart from it?

I believe that when I go back to my house at Berkeley Square at half past five tonight, I shall walk straight into the 18th century and meet the people living there.

Binks: Why—why—I can understand what they’re saying!

Bobby: So can I! It’s that magic crystal that did it!

He ran a few steps forward in the dark, stumbling. The syncopated, thudding hoofbeats broke rhythm, paused. . . And Bart Henderson found himself, in broad daylight, standing beside a fine carriage driven by a coachman in livery, drawn by two black horses with silver-trimmed harness.

EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.

My name is Stuart Taylor. Do you mind if I ask what seems a silly question! What year is this?

It was lovely in the magic ship, lovelier than any one could possibly have imagined. The wind sent their hair streaming backwards. Birds flew past with movements scarcely less graceful that those of the ship. The children sang for joy in the keen, fresh air. The song that they sang had no words, it just came out in trills and rhythms because they were so happy.

“My subject,” he began, “is the science of astronomy. I am going to be frank. In my land and time . . . uh . . . that is—” Guy frowned. He had warned him against any mention of that insane delusion of his about having been catapulted back from a future age. But Cambray recovered himself. “What I meant is that there are far greater masters of this science where I come from. I am familiar only with the skirts of this knowledge. Yet what I have to say will be novel to you, and will doubtless upset many of your present concepts.”

The young dramalist expects to face his biggest casting problem in filling the roles of the two Neanderthal men which he has written into “And Adam Begot.” He wants a voice, he explains, which will instantly suggest a cave-man to the radio listener. With that in mind, he conducted a survey of what people expect in a Neanderthal voice. “A cross-section of the answers,” Oboler says, “suggests a bass voiced prizefighter, talking double talk with his mouth full of hot potatoes.”

I flung open the door, and I fell headlong down a flight of stairs. I had dropped into the corridor where I had seen the servants pass with their jugs and tankards. For some time I lay half-stunned with surprise, but unhurt, for I had fallen silently like a feather floating to the floor. I looked round at the door, but it had disappeared; I stared at the low whitewashed ceiling and the carved doorways, and I listened to the beating of my heart which was the only sound. Then life seemed to come to the world, distant shouts of men, the jingle of harness, and the lowing of cattle. A cock crew as if to wake the dead, and I sat up trying to remember . . . remember . . .

Never before had it occurred to me to ask myself why the sun should rise each morning on a new day instead of upon the old day over again; or to wonder how much of what I did was really my own to do. It may be that here on this earth we are not grateful enough for our ignorance, and our innocence. We think that there is only one road, one direction—forward; and we accept it, and press on. We think of God, we think of the mystery of the universe, but we do not think about it very much, and we do not really believe that it is a mystery, or that we could not understand it if it were explained to us.

The only way for us to try to get the machine working and topple ourselves one way or the other. If we fall back, we will all live. If we fall into the present—we may die.

Then an oddity struck Eben. For the past few minutes that he had been on this intersection the sun had been at high noon! He put his tumb in his eye and peered at it accusingly and then because it was quite definitely the sun and obviously there, he shook his head and muttered:

“Never can tell what the goldurned guvvermunt is going to do next!”

He was sure it would work. But when he confided his dreams to his sister Martha, she, woman-like, merely sniffed. She called him a goose.

Then as soon as I release you from that pentacle, you’re to bring me tomorrow’s newspaper.

‘Four-dimensional, Mr. Mac? But the fourth dimension is time.’ I had learned that the year before, in the third grade.

I’ve simply come back into time at the wrong point.

We can drop you anywhere in the continuum.

But I’m afraid I’m going to end up at the St. George Hotel at 6:25 no matter where I go.

But one of Mr. Lupescu’s friends, now, was captain of a ship, only it went in time, and Mr. Lupescu took trips with him and came back and told you all about what was happening this very minute five hundred years ago.

She was dressed in a long linen duster and a linen hat, bound round with an emerald veil tied in a bow under her chin. Modish clothing for motoring—in 1905.

Don’t you understand, George? It’s because you were never born.

It is the same in all we do. Our houses grow new and we dismantle them and stow the materials inconspicuously away, in mine and quarry, forest and field. Our clothes grow new and we put them off. And we grow new and forget and blindly seek a mother.

How many times have you said, “I wish I could live this year over again?” This is the story of a woman who did relive one year of her life.

Within the Isles the children are transported,
The most of them despairing and forlorn,
Upon the soil their lives will be supported
While hope shall flee.. . .

I should never have taken the trouble to pocket his Account of a Strange Monster Captured Near Brighthelmstone in the County of Sussex on August 6th in the Year of Our Lord 1745.

There’s something different about that child. I wondered if my pencil could catch it.

In the fifth chapter of that treatise, Pier Damiani asserts—against Aristotle and against Fredegarius de Tours—that it is within God’s power to make what once was into something that has never been. Reading those old theological discussions, I began to understand Pedro Damiá’s tragic story.

An ancestor of mine built this house in 1730. See that picture there, above the fireplace? His father. Look at it.

You’ve heard of the transmigration of soul; have you ever heard of the transposition of a man’s body in time and place?

Then the man saw that he had made a tactical mistake; so he turned back the clock a few minutes and tried the conversation over again.

Tomorrow, my tomorrow, is the day of the President’s death.

“I don’t want to go either. It’s been so wonderful,” she said, “this little time alone together. I love this funny little bar; I’ve loved every moment here. I wish today would never end.”

I turned toward the ticket windows knowing that here—on the third level at Grand Central—I could buy tickets that would take Louisa and me anywhere in the United States we wanted to go. In the year 1894.

Peter gazed at it in silence. His head was feeling oddly numb, and the mist seemed to swirl around him with redoubled speed and thickness. Hardly realizing what he was doing, he slipped his right hand inside the heavy gauntlet, and this fingers groped inside the wide spaces, for it was far too large for his small hand.

From behind there came the thud of hooves, a shout, shrill and defiant, the clang of metal on metal, and then a confused roar of sounds, shouts, more hoof-beats, clang after clang, dying away into the distance as suddenly as they had come. The gauntlet slipped from Peter’s hand, and he shook himself as if he had just awakened.

You don’t understand. Look at the short, hairy, twisted body—the neck bent, the head thrust forward, those enormous brows, the short flat nose. . .

Air power in the Civil War? Well, it’s been a pretty well-kept secret all these years, but we had it. The Major and me invented it ourselves.

Roger, I believe the 18th century still exists. It’s all around us, if only we could find it. Put it this way: Polaris, the North Star, is very bright, yet its light takes nearly fifty years to reach us. For all we know, Polaris may have ceased to exist somewhere around 1900. Yet we still see it, its past is our present. As far as Polaris is concerned, Teddy Roosevelt is just going down San Juan hill.

I saw the ghost in my own living room, alone, between three and four in the morning, and I was there, wide awake, for a perfectly sound reason: I was worrying.

Greetings from Hollywood. Ladies and gentlemen: I think you’ll be as intrigued with our play tonight as I was when I discovered it was a most unusual love story, the story of a modern scientist in love with a girl whom he meets in another century.

Consider an attic. Its very atmosphere is Time. It deals in other years, the cocoons and chrysalises of another age. All the bureau drawers are little coffins where a thousand yesterdays lie in state. Oh, the attic’s a dark, friendly place, full of Time, and if you stand in the very center of it, straight and tall, squinting your eyes, and thinking and thinking, and smelling the Past, and putting out your hands to feel of Long ago, why, it. . .

“I wonder what killed it?” Hafton wondered curiously, cutting swiftly through the thick masses of mastodon meat.

The ferra of the cup has to be skilled in all branches of demonology. I had just graduated from college—with only passing grades. But of course, I thought I could handle anything.

Don’t you see? She wished she were home and ended up halfway home! I wished there’d be a fire and got a little fire! A child’s-size fire! Martha wished Carrie could talk and she can half talk!

Got himself killed is right. Eleven-fifteen at night in Times Square—the theaters letting out, busiest time and place in the world—and this guy shows up in the middle of the street, gawking and looking around at the cars and up at the signs like he'd never seen them before.

Time must have stood still in this region of Earth. Take a picture of this mastondia before it goes for us.

That Madam Futura knows everything! She can see the past, the present, and the future!

Won’t things become rather confused if people see and hear there are two of us?

If I could just go back to my youth, start over! I wouldn’t make the same mistakes I made then!

Now, he thought, what? This was scarcely dinosaur country.

It happened just the other day, to a boy named Roger.

Most of it happened to his sister Ann, too, but she was a girl and didn’t count, or at least that’s what Roger thought, or at least he thought that in the beginning.

Part of it happened to his cousins Jack and Eliza, too, but they didn’t come into it till later.

George was deliriously happy. Two years of red tape and now he was finally back in the past. Now he could complete his paper on the social life of the foot soldier of World War II with some authentic details.

"Oh, Professor," half chided Helen Crane, "You don’t mean to say that you believe in these dreams. That the past can actually come back into the present."

He cried all night—he didn’t stop till just now! He can’t be just teething! I’m taking the day off . . . We’re going to the doctor to find out why!

I saw this move somewhere . . . If I could just remember!

No . . . it’s all an illusion! I’ve been working too hard!

I felt so strange . . . as if I were not alone! As if I were not myself!

Ten years of anything you want, within reason, and then you’re a demon. You’re one of us, with a new name of demonic potency, and many privileges beside. You’ll hardly know you’re damned.

Peculiar things go on ’round that old mansion!

So it wasn’t too surprising that Harry just happened to be passing by the new building going up when a small bag of cement fell from the second story scaffolding.

But she’d never push me around if we lived back in the time of the cavemen! No, siree! I’d be boss.

There is no money . . . just the house. As the last of the Jaremys, it’s your duty.

It happened just the other day, to a boy named Roger.

Most of it happened to his sister Ann, too, but she was a girl and didn’t count, or at least that’s what Roger thought, or at least he thought that in the beginning.

Part of it happened to his cousins Jack and Eliza, too, but they didn’t come into it till later.

Say, that’s the Tuesday Review program! And today is Monday! How could that be?

I heard that story you just told . . . and I believe you!

Bart: Do you think it’s possible for a person to go back in time?

George: Well, you know there is a theory that nothing is lost, nothing is destroyed.

Bart: Then you do believe it’s possible?

George: Anything is possible, Bart, to a degree. Science has proved that. It’s conceivable, with concentration and imagination, that a person might, for a moment, escape from the present into the past.

The day’s starting over again! This doll’s going to fall for me . . . Only this time I’m going to work things different!

Town gardens are small, as a rule, and the Longs’ garden was no exception to the rule; there was a vegetable plot and a grass plot and one flower-bed and a rough patch by the back fence.

He fought sleep like a man fighting demons! But no man can stay awake forever! His eyelids began to close, heavy with fatigue, his head began to nod . . .

Will you come right over? My water heater looks dangerous!

Now we will see into the coree of the atom . . . the core which is the basis of all things! We will be able to produce life in the test tube, blow up the world with the touch of a finger!

Because what if it did happen like that, and the young Jane and Mark and Katharine and Martha came back with them to modern times? He could think of two ways it might work out. They might take the place of their grown-up selves, and there wouldn’t be any grown-up Jane and Mark and Katharine and Martha any more, and that would be awful. Because nice as the small Martha was, as a parent she just wouldn’t do.

Or else there Jane and Mark and Katharine and Martha would be, and there their grown-up selves would be, too, and they might bump right into each other. And that would be like those horror stories where people go walking down long hallways and meet themselves coming in the other direction. And everybody goes mad in the end, and no wonder!

Motor trouble! Must go down! According to my reckoning I must be close to my ancestral home in West Croyden . . .

I have had a vision of my victory tomorrow!

Milly: They’re like seven-league boots!

Billy: Even better! We’re covering a hundred miles at a step and we’re going back through history, too! These Ward shoes must have magical powers!

You know, you have touched upon a train of thought that has always interested me—our sense of time. Time, as we know it, is only an objective concept, like a sense of color. We here upon this earth are moving upon a plane and recognize as really existing only the small circle lighted by our consciousness, one meridian. That which is behind has disappeared and that which is ahead has not yet appeared, so we say that they do not exist.

Look! Another ship in front of us.

When the four O  ::  children, Lucy, Robert, Charles, and May, were orphaned by a freak of circumstances, they were sent to live in the Past with two spinster relatives, ostensibly because of crowded conditions elsewhere.

They want to live as much as I do. I am the first me, and therefore the real me; but they are also me—different moments of consciousness in me—but they are me.

Yet somehow he knew that all would be well with him. Somehow, as never before, he knew.

Attention, comrades, attention! Here is a complementary production bulletin issued by the Ministry of Plenty giving further glorious news of the success of the seventh three-year plan! In clear demonstration of the rising standards of our new, happy life, the latest calculated increases are as follows. . .

The folded paper opened stiffly, the crease permanent with age, and even before I saw the date I knew this letter was old. The handwriting was obviously feminine, and beautifully clear—it’s called Spencerian, isn’t it?—the letters perfectly formed and very ornate, the capitals especially being a whirl of dainty curlicues. The ink was rust-black, the date at the top of the page was May 14, 1882, and reading it, I saw that it was a love letter.

I know you’ve come from a long way from here . . . a long way and a long time.

I say, Wright, now Guy’s here, we can get on with it.

What have you got in there? Some sort of machine? Crystal ball? . . . You can see ahead, can’t you? You can look into the future.

He who would claim this camera as his own will have a life of woe heed this warning.

You mustn’t touch the clock! It’s enchanted! It will put you under a spell!

To make sure, I walked over to a newsboy and glanced at the stack of papers at his feet. It was The World; and The World had’nt been published for years. The lead story said something about President Cleveland. I’ve found that front page since, in the Public Library files, and it was printed June 11, 1894.

Caswell: I wanna see if there are things out there like you described to me. Carriages without horses and the buildings that rise to—

Professor Manion: They’re out there, Caswell. . . . Things you can’t imagine.

This is a funny lookin’ bottle—yeah, neat. But I bet if I took it home, Pop would say, “It’s just another piece of junk.” Nobody let’s me do anything I want to. I wish I was far away from here; I wish I was on a pirate ship.

Willoughby, sir? That’s Willoughby right outside. Willoughby, July, summer. It’s 1888—really a lovely little village. You ought to try it sometime. Peaceful, restful, where a man can slow down to a walk and live his live full-measure.

I’m a little tensed up, I guess, but I can do it. I wasn’t really scared; it was the way it happened, so sudden. They never gave me a chance to get ready.

He remembered then that he had been awakened that morning by just such a call.

I awoke this morning to some very puzzling incidents. It seemed that time itself had stopped, or that the whole world had gone into super-slow motion.

You want me to tell you your future, I presume.

Miss Belle Herbert once lived here! During the Civil War she was a southern spy and captured by Major Joshua White!

Laura! The freshest, most radiant creature God ever created. Eighteen when I married her, Marty, . . . twenty-five when she died.

I’ve got a devil of a lot more than a premonition. Lincole will be assassinated unless somebody tries to prevent it!

Man I’d give anything to be free! Anything!!

Maybe—maybe I could travel into the future by thinking myself there.

But I want a young wife--a glamorous one! Not a middle-aged female!

We’re looking at a vanished sight. This is a commonplace sight of a world long gone and we’ve reached back and brought it to life again. Maybe we should have let it alone.

I refuse to make any statement about whether or not those two crossed a Time Barrier.

He looks for real! So does the chariot!

Can it really be that I’ve gone back into . . . the past??!

“I knew it was a book!” whispered Susan excitedly. “It’s the girl in the Half Magic picture! It’s the little girl in the last chapter who finds the charm after Jane and Mark and Katharine and Martha pass it on!”

On the way, he met the other Mr. Morky, who was still struggling to get back, and there was a collision. He fused with himself. Unfortunately, it was an abnormal fusion, quite cancerous; all that custard pie started dividing and re-dividing and re-re-dividing into an infinite multiple division.

I GUARANTEE UNUSUAL DIVERSIONS—NO ENTRANCE FEE—ONE TRIAL WILL CONVINCE YOU—APPLY NOW—BECOME A MEMBER OF OUR SOCIETY—DISCRETION ASSURED—ADDRESS BOX 322628

I can visit nine different lives. Anywhere, any time, any country, any century.

He thought back over his sixty years. The betrayals, the disappointments, the sins, the hangovers. He had some money now, and by some standards he was a successful man. But life hadn't been any joyride. It had been rocky and fear-torn, filled with doubts and headaches, moments of complete despair, others of frustrated pain.

Off-shore, the deeper swells of the open sea surged across the roofs of the submerged houses, the white-caps cleft by the spurs of isolated chimnies.

It had come to her that part of the seventh floor must have been converted in o a very realistic stage set, and that the woman and the girl had been rehearsing their parts in a play. But no, that couldn’t be it. No stage set that she had ever seen was so realistic thatyoucould hear cows and smell flowers and feel the warmth of the sunlight.

Unseen by human eyes, the two mighty spirit images race thru time and space . . .

♫We’re knockin’ off his knick-knacks♫

On the way there, with not one sound, the dog passed away. Died on the front seat—as if he knew. . . and knowing, picked the better way.

A person can suddenly disappear before our eyes, by accidentally or purposely stepping into another dimension.

We approach the time-space continuum of ancient Babylonia— It is there that the book which we seek was created milenniums [sic] ago!

Somehow I’ve become another Jessamy in a different time! It must be a different time because of the clothes. Nobody wears long skirts like Matchett and Aunt now—I mean that—oh, I don’t know what I mean!

I’m afraid you must forgive me, miss. If we have met before, I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember it.

We could see the cavalry, the caissons and the old-time cannon. The men said we must of lost our way—and we’d run into a movie outfit makin’ a Civil War picture.

Lucy found it very confusing. “I don’t think I really understand this Wheel of Time business even now,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t understand it,” said Jamie cheerfully, “but then I don’t understand television either. But when you’ve seen it working, you can’t help believing in it.”

“But I’m not Clare,” Charlotte began to say hopelessly, then stopped herself, explanation being impossible, especially since this girl seemed to think so incredibly that she was Clare.

Humbug! Insolent young ruffians coming here with their Christmas nonsense!

My thoughts were of myself: I’m coming to save you. I’m coming, Gus. You won’t hurt any more. . . you’ll never hurt.

Time is an ocean, and events come drifting to us as randomly as dead animals on the waves. We filter them. We screen out what doesn’t make sense and admit them to our consciousness in what seems to be the right sequence.

She was lean, though full enough in hips and firm breasts to please any man, and long-limbed, swan-necked, head proudly held. That head was dolichocephalic but wide across brow and cheeks, tapering toward the chin, with, a classically straight nose and a full and mobile mouth which was a touch too big for conventional beauty. Arching brows and sooty lashes framed large bright eyes whose hazel shifted momentarily from leaf-green to storm-gray. Her black hair, thick and wavy, fell past her shoulders; a white streak ran back from the forehead. Except for suntan, a dusting of freckles, a few fine wrinkles and crow’s-feet, a beginning dryness, her skin was clear and fair. He guessed her age as about equal to his.

I tossed the few bits of gravel and did the thing that had never been done, ever in my life.

“Go ahead, (now + n),” he tells me. ((To him I am (now + n). To myself I am (now). Everything is relative; n is exactly forty-eight hours these days.))

Now is the time. Look straight ahead and don’t be afraid.

A new sound came; in the blurred distances, something moved. Vaguely seen, a huge face looked over him and made soft, deep clucking noises. Then he understood.

And Myron Castleman would be permitted to lie forever, piling up experiences and memories, but each of only an hour’s duration, each resumed at 12:01 PM on this balmy spring day in Manhattan, standing outside near the Grand Central Tower.

“D-dark?” he stammered. “I’ll switch on the light.”

He lit a cigarette and leafed through the cards and minutiae that constituted his identity in the outside world. Well. . . knowing himself, his driver’s permit would be up-to-date and all credit cards unexpired. The year was 1970. Another look outside: autumn. So he was thirty-five, and the pans clattered at the hands of Judy.

Allosaurus stopped as the water rushed over his feet. They could see the bulk of him, his neck and heavy legs; his tail that was flattenedon the sides. He was big as a full grown tree. Then he turned and Joe saw his teeth. They were jagged as steak knives.