Down in my lead-walled room I shall drink my special drug and fall into a coma which
would on the surface of the earth last (at most) a few hours. But down there, shielded
from all change, I shall never wake until I am again subjected to radiation.
Certainly. . . . the Great Brain is infallible.
Who would want to act contrary to reason?
Take our own single city, for the rest of the world is about the same, if not worse, how
many people are alive . . . er .
. . really alive and awake? Just four hundred and thirty by the last
count. And these few people must feed themselves andprovide electrical energy and control
the dream records for more than one million sleepers!
“Yes. You called them cities,” she explained, “and that is essentially what this
is. You had many thousands of people in each city, it is true—I suppose you could not
afford many cities?—while we have a city for every inhabitant. But otherwise they are,
I should imagine, much the same.”
We must make him young again—what a chance to try out the full cell-cycle!
This may be the earliest use of something akin to a “wheel of time.”
Time’s all mixed up. It’s as if the universe were the rim of a great wheel, whirling
through Time. As if, somehow, we have left that rim, shot inward along different spokes
whose outer ends are different years, far apart, and reached the wheel’s axis where all
the year-spokes join. The center point of the hub, that doesn’t move at all through
Time, because it is the center. Where there is no Time. Where the past and the present
and the future are all one. A land, in some weird other dimension, where Time stands
still.
Your time scale has been altered. A minute in the outer world would be a year in this
room.