Swimming strongly on my way back to what the sage called the remote future, my form began to flow and change according to time pressure. Sometimes my essence was like steam, sometimes like a mountain.

The comedian looked just like a living, breathing, three-dimensional human being, the reincarnation of Lenny Bruce, come to see the unhappy world end.

What’;s happening? I’ll tell you what’s happening. Those “films” you see flying off surfaces and hitting your eyes—that’s how our friend here thought visions worked. And now we’re seeing it happen, as though it’s true.

A decade of peace and quiet and short hair was winding down; a time when people knew their place and stayed in it. For ten years nobody had wanted anything but a new car and a bigger TV set. Now all that was about to change. In a little over a year the Cuban missile crisis would send thousands of people into their back yards to dig bomb shelters, and “advisors” would start pouring into Southeast Asia. In another year the president would be dead.

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Parks and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Ares and a multitude of others, all at the same time.

The hamster is back. Also my wristwatch, which I strapped on its back.

“I said, have you got something going,” she repeated, still with the accent—the accent of my own time.