October the First Is Too Late

Chapter Thirteen: Allegretto e Sempre Cantabile

My first thought was that I had awakened at last from a long nightmare, or more likely from some fever. It was in Hawaii everything had started to go wrong. At a first glance here I was back again in Hawaii. The quality of the light, the high mountains, were superficially similar. Could this strange building be some kind of isolation hospital?

The pyjamas I was wearing might also at first glance have been taken for some exotic Hawaiian garment. But the material wasn’t right, it was much too expensive in its weave and colouring. Then nobody I had ever known had conceived of a house like this, not even in the wildest dreams. Besides it couldn’t be Hawaii. Those mountains must be at least fifty miles away. The visibility was tremendous. At such a range on Hawaii I would have been looking out over the sea but there was no sign of an ocean. There had been many flowers on Hawaii but nothing to compare with this luxuriant profusion.

Step by step I went over recent events. The night at the temple was last night. I was convinced of it. Yet this was quite certainly not Greece. The style of the house, its spaciousness, the countryside, and above all those mountains, were definitely not Grecian.

Although strange and singular things had been happening, up to this point they had not happened to me personally. This was the first big jump in my own personal consciousness. Subjectively I felt quite normal, yet objectively it seemed as if I must be as nutty as a squirrel.

I decided to search the house. I saw a second curtain opening off the balcony. As it was of the same material as before I simply walked through it without experiencing any sensation except a gentle brushing against the cheek. There were further rooms, smaller but designed in much the same fashion as the big room. However in one of them there was a table. It was the only article of furniture to be seen anywhere. On it was a considerable pile of musical manuscripts. The briefest inspection showed they were the works on which I had spent the winter, in the little temple of Dionysus. At least in that respect I was not crazy. I flicked through the pages. My memory was right in every respect, all the details were in place, exactly as they should have been. At least some things were right, inexplicable as the basic facts seemed on the face of it. I went back to the large room. Sitting there on the floor was John Sinclair.

I collapsed by his side and said weakly, ‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘I thought you might be getting worried. I’ve been round twice before but you were asleep. It’s incredible you managed to get here.’

‘Incredible?’

‘You’d better tell me exactly what happened, before you woke up to find yourself here I mean.’

I started to give a general outline of my experience in Greece. John would have none of it. He demanded I should go through everything in complete detail. I came at last to the night in the temple. At the end of my description of the contest with the god, John began to laugh delightedly.

Remembering the ordeal I said, sourly, ‘You’re not the only one to find it funny. By now the whole of Athens will be laughing hysterically about it.’

‘Piqued, eh? You know it’s ironical. While I would have been quite incapable myself of putting up any sort of musical performance, I could have told you straightaway what it was you were dealing with.’

‘What the devil d’you mean?’

‘Isn’t it perfectly obvious? It was the music of the future.’

I sat digesting this as best I could. He went on, ‘Perhaps now you can realize why I was so keen to look everywhere, all over the Earth. Don’t think I didn’t want to come with you to Greece. I would have loved it, but I was convinced that the Britain of 1966 wasn’t the last moment of time to be abroad on the Earth. Remember all the different periods we saw, perhaps five thousand B.C. in the Middle East, four hundred B.C. in Greece, the eighteenth century in America, 1917 in Europe, why stop at 1966 in Britain? There had to be something more.’

‘So you went on searching?’

‘High and low. We drew a complete blank everywhere in the southern hemisphere. I can’t be entirely sure about South America because we ran into terrible weather there. You remember the Plain of Glass?’

I nodded and he went on:

‘You see that just had to be the distant future, far away in the future.’

‘Why?’

John made no immediate answer. He took a small box-like device from his pocket and pressed what seemed to be a switch. Instantly the floor became everywhere very soft, as if one had sunk into a feather bed. Because of the rises and hollows it was easy to get oneself into a comfortable position. Then he did something again to the box and the floor went quite hard again, at least hard compared to what it had been a moment before. I found myself sitting in what might have been taken for an extremely comfortable chair.

‘So that’s why they don’t need any chairs?’

‘That’s right. Would you like some food?’

Now he came to mention it, I was damned hungry. I said so.

‘Come on then. I’ll show you some other gadgets.’

He led the way to one of the subsidiary rooms. He pressed a small button. Instantly a panel slid by and what seemed to be a typewriter keyboard appeared on one of the walls.

‘What would you like?’

I said I would like fruit juice and bacon and egg.

‘I’ll do the best I can.’

John tapped the keyboard as if he was writing a message, then gave one final flourish, pressing what seemed to be a master button. About ten seconds later a kind of hatchway opened and out came a metal arm on which were two trays. On each tray was a large glass of yellow juice, which I took to be orange juice. There was also what seemed to be a slice of bread or toast covered in some reddish fluffy stuff.

‘What the hell is this?’

‘Your bacon and egg. I think I got it right.’

He dipped his finger into the froth and tasted it. Then he nodded and said, more seriously:

‘Let’s go back and talk.’

Somewhat bemused, I followed him. We took up our respective positions on the floor.

John explained: ‘You see these people don’t eat animals, so all the food is either vegetable or synthetic. There are literally hundreds of these preparations. I haven’t sampled more than a small fraction of them yet.’

I tried the orange juice. It was excellent, in fact I couldn’t recall tasting any better. Then I addressed myself to the froth. I had no complaint about that either. It wasn’t bacon and egg by any means but it fell into the right kind of savoury class. ‘Where the devil does the taste come from?’

‘Well of course it’s artificial in the sense the chemicals are produced synthetically, but they’re the right chemicals, the ones you really get in the sort of food we’re used to. Incidentally, you’ll find the calorific value is quite low. You can eat bags of this stuff without growing fat.’

And then we were back to more gadgets. John had a piece of his bread and froth left. He smeared the froth on to the carpet material and chucked the piece of bread to the far side of the room. ‘Time to get the sweeper out,’ he remarked cheerfully. ‘Better come over to the doorway.’

He took out his little box and fiddled again with it. There was a sort of blowing noise from the sides of the room, from what would be the wainscoting in a normal house. A white strip started at one side. It moved slowly across to the other side, where it finally disappeared. In its wake there was nothing but clean carpet. The whole process took about thirty seconds. John was like a small boy with a toy. ‘Not much trouble about housekeeping, is there?’

He stopped clowning and we went on to the balcony. He produced what looked rather like two deck chairs. Thank god for a touch of normality, I thought.

‘You were talking about the Plain of Glass. Why does it belong so obviously to the future?’

‘Because it’s been melted, everywhere, smoothly. You know the Sun is going to get hotter and hotter as time goes on. There’ll be a stage when the whole surface of the Earth melts. After that the Sun will cool. Everywhere over the Earth there’ll be smooth glass. You remember what I said about its not being etched by blown grit or sand. There couldn’t be any sand with everything fused. Besides at that stage there would be no atmosphere, no wind. The Plain of Glass is the ultimate fate of the Earth.’

I sat for some time sipping my orange juice, letting all this sink in.

John went on. ‘You see, it was a fair bet that if the distant future were represented here, there ought to be something in between, between 1966 and the far-off future. That’s why I was so convinced it was worth going on searching.’

‘Didn’t you expect these people of the future would show themselves?’

‘Not necessarily. Remember your own point of view about the Greeks. You were worried at the mere idea of mobs of our own people streaming into Greece. You wanted to leave it as much the way it was as you could. The future could be quite shy of appearing amongst us for exactly the same reason. They couldn’t simply declare themselves as strangers, in the way you could when you arrived at Athens. The same thing in London would be impossible.’

‘Yet they must have appeared in Greece.’

‘For exactly the reason I’ve just given you. One thing I don’t quite understand is how they’ve managed to keep Europeans out of Greece. You must have been lucky enough to get through their barrier before they closed it.’

‘You think that’s why our own people never arrived?’

‘Fairly obvious, isn’t it? Somehow the communication lines must have been cut. I can’t quite see how, but we must realize these people are at least as far ahead of us technologically as we are ahead of the Greeks. I don’t think there’s much profit in worrying too much about practical details. If the Britain of 1966 could put an instant stop to the war in Europe, with only a technological lead of fifty years, a society with a lead of thousands of years wouldn’t have too much trouble in hiving off a bit of the Earth. In any case that’s exactly what they’ve done with their own country.’

I looked away towards the mountains. ‘Where are we? I was trying to puzzle it out before you came. The nearest I could get was Hawaii, but that didn’t seem right.’

John looked at his watch. ‘It’s not very far from midday. If you were to sit here for several hours you’d see the Sun move from left to right. Now work it out for yourself.’

The Sun moved from left to right, did it? I thought for a few minutes. This must mean we were in the northern hemisphere, because the Sun had to be south of the zenith. As far as I could judge, there was an angle of about twenty degrees between the direction of the Sun and the vertical. So far so good. Then it was early spring, at least it had been only the beginning of April in Greece. If it was the same here it meant the angle between the Sun and the vertical was pretty well the geographical latitude, evidently twenty degrees north or thereabouts. My next thought was of the Himalayas. Could these mountains be the Himalayas? Then I remembered the Himalayan range is much further north than one usually supposes. In fact the equator goes south of the whole of India, the mountains come at thirty degrees north. I looked up again towards the Sun, the angle couldn’t be as much as thirty degrees. Mentally I ran along a parallel of latitude, first into Burma. Obviously Burma wasn’t right either, unless the vegetation was completely changed. Then I thought about Arabia and Africa. None of it fitted. The solution came to me last of all. The twentieth parallel must cut through America somewhere about Mexico City. The clarity of the air, the feeling I had of altitude, the mountains, were right.

‘Mexico, of course.’

‘Very good.’

‘How did you get here yourself?’

‘A good question, considering the way you got here. Damn it, I know what I’m looking for and I have to comb the whole Earth before I find it. All you have to do is to walk up a hill to a temple and what happens, you run slap bang into these people of the future.’

I had a clear memory of the priestess standing on the steps looking down at me in the little garden. So that was the explanation of why she seemed so different, why she was so tall. Melea, she had told me her name was last night, if it was last night.

‘You know, John, my manuscripts. When I came up to the temple I didn’t bring them with me. I left them back at the place where I was working. Somehow they must have been retrieved.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’re definitely persona grata. After your musical performance. You see it’s very likely they’ve lost all of our music. It must have come as quite a shock to them to hear it. I’m all right myself now, but it wasn’t easy in the beginning. We got here during a storm. Otherwise I’m sure they would have misled us through the radio. We found a place to land and came down.’

‘What happened to the rest of the crew?’

‘I’ll tell you about them in a moment. Of course the people here wanted to know who we were, all manner of detail.’

‘How about language difficulties?’

‘You’ll see how they cope with that, all in good time.’

‘So you got to the place where you wanted to be?’

‘I was agog to find out what they knew. I was curious about a lot of technical problems in physics, obviously. It was like doing a puzzle in a newspaper. You’re told the solution is on page eight, column four. If you find you can’t do the puzzle, the natural thing is to look at the answer, which was the way I felt about a lot of things. I asked a lot of questions in return, which was lucky for me, otherwise they’d have dealt with me the same way they did with the rest of the crew.

‘We had to go back in their textbooks quite a fair way before we reached the things I know about. One of my own discoveries I found under somebody else’s name. Naturally I didn’t take at all kindly to this. When I pointed it out, they instantly changed their tune and became very friendly. All doors were opened to me as it were. Well, two or three days after our landing, I learnt the plane was being sent away. I didn’t want to go myself for obvious reasons but I did want to send a message. So I sought out the crew.’

John stopped at this point, his usual habit, just when he had reached the decisive point.

‘Well,’ I grunted.

‘They didn’t know me, they damned well didn’t know me from Adam. There was nothing wrong with them physically. Of course when they made no move to recognize me it was clear the people here didn’t want any message sent. I saw it wasn’t a good idea to press the point. So I simply let the plane go.’

‘Why didn’t they recognize you?’

‘Well, it’s perhaps not really so surprising. What we can do with drugs, anaesthetics and so on, would seem astonishing to the Greeks, wouldn’t it? I don’t think they had been harmed in any way, except they would lose their memory of the whole incident. It would be a kind of artificially induced amnesia.’

‘You think that’s why I remember absolutely nothing between the temple and here?’

‘I would say so. Probably they didn’t want you making a fuss.’

I decided I would have another glass of orange juice. For some reason I was extremely thirsty. John gave me a description of which button to press and I went to the kitchen alone. With a bit of fiddling I got what I wanted, but I got plenty of other stuff as well. I took the whole lot back to the balcony, for I was getting hungry again. I had in fact lost weight during the winter. For the most part I had lived on fish and on a kind of cake made out of honey and flour. After such a pleasant but monotonous diet, the profusion of tastes coming from the machines in the kitchen had quite a fascination.

‘How advanced are these people, technologically I mean?’ I asked as I munched the odd concoctions.

‘Considering they’re something like six thousand years beyond us, not as much as I would have expected. At the development pace of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I’d say they’re about five hundred years on. Of course that’s impressive enough. It’s about the gap which separated us from the fifteenth century. They’ve apparently been able to put into practice things we could only just conceive of. For instance they can produce enormous captive magnetic fields. You do this with a superconducting material, which prevents you from having ridiculous heating problems. Our trouble was that we couldn’t get sufficiently rigid materials, and we had to fuss with very low temperatures. Somehow they’ve got rigid serviceable materials. Very strong magnetic fields have become a standard part of their technology, like the electric motor and dynamo are with us. You’ll find their vehicles look at first sight like a hovercraft. They float over the ground. But they don’t do it by blowing air. They simply ride on a magnetic field. The logistics of it work just like a railway system. They’ve got tracks laid out all over the country. But the tracks are magnetic, nothing at all like railway lines. The great thing about it is that it’s all silent, and it’s all computer controlled. Apparently you ring up for a vehicle in the same way as we might ring up for a taxi.’

‘But with travelling as individual as that, like taxis, I’d have thought there’d be an almost impossible crush.’

‘I think the secret of it is that there just aren’t many people. We think in terms of tens or hundreds of millions. I haven’t found out yet exactly how many of them there are, but it can’t be anything like a twentieth-century population.’

It was all very intriguing. Already I had a fancy to do a bit of travelling around myself.

‘How did you know to come up here?’

‘I had information you were here.’

‘You realize what that means?’

‘I don’t think it’s as bad as you think. Look, who were your special friends in Greece? You give me an answer because I’ve asked an entirely reasonable question, not because I force an answer out of you. That’s probably what you did. There may be nothing more to it.’

‘And I’ve since forgotten all about it?’

‘I thought we agreed about that. Anyway they told me you would be here. Something more, they’re going to put on a special film show for us. To give us an idea of the things that have happened in the span of time between our day and theirs. I gather it’ll last for quite a time, although they apologized for the sparsity of some of the material. They said we would realize why when we’d seen it.’

We went back inside to the main room. John hunted around until he found a master switch. When he pressed it the same thing happened as in the kitchen, a panel slid back and a kind of typewriter keyboard appeared. Only this time there were many more keys on it. John took out a piece of paper:

‘I’ve got the code here, at least I’ve got instructions about which buttons to press. Until we get used to it we’d better do what they tell us. Otherwise we may find ourselves inside the washing machine.’

He pressed I suppose about half a dozen keys. On one of the flat pieces of the wall there appeared a picture. It was a pleasant country scene in colour, no more. ‘That must be the call signal.’

We made ourselves a couple of comfortable armchairs in the floor and sat down to wait. There was a sudden commotion outside. Then in streamed my priestess, Melea, followed by another girl. I kissed Melea, and for good measure the other girl too. They were strikingly similar. Noticing the picture on the wall Melea said something in a strange language. She went to the keyboard on the wall and punched a few buttons. The picture disappeared. Something else must have happened, for there were a few small clicks, but I didn’t notice anything by eye. Then Melea made quite a little speech, again in the strange language. A second or two after she had finished I was astonished to hear her voice again in the room. I say in the room because it didn’t come from any particular place. I suppose there must have been a lot of small speakers distributed everywhere over the walls. The astonishing thing was that the language was English, with a very curious pronunciation, but English nevertheless.

‘This is my friend Neria. She too was in Greece, at the temple of Delphi. That also was a temple of Apollo. It was she who made the prophecy about the war between Athens and Sparta. Will you not introduce your friend?’

I began to speak in my not very good Greek. She interrupted me:

‘It will be much better if you speak in your own language.’

So I made the introduction. Immediately I had finished there came my own voice, I would have sworn it was mine, in a language of which I didn’t know a single word. Naturally I was pretty dumbfounded. The girls stepped forward and kissed John, one after the other, which must have surprised him as much as the language business did me. Off his guard, he turned to me and said:

‘Did they behave in Greece like this?’ Immediately after he had finished, his voice was heard everywhere throughout the room in the new language. The girls made the incident into a joke which helped break the ice. I’ve noticed before that when you’ve been close and intimate with a girl you haven’t known for more than a short time the second meeting is always a slight embarrassment. One can never be sure whether the situation is still the same as it had been. So I was glad this moment of embarrassment was out of the way.

Melea turned to me and smiled. ‘We have brought you a present. In fact we’ve brought you two, one from each of us, but we are only going to let you see one at a time.’

The translation system made for very accurate understanding but I could see it was going to be a bit stilted. It wouldn’t be right over breakfast.

Now it was Neria who went to the keyboard. With a deliberate flourish of the hand she tapped away at two or three of the buttons. I was quite unprepared for what followed. I suppose I expected some kind of picture to appear on the wall. But no, in through the doorway from the direction of the kitchen an object glided into the room. It made no sound as it moved. Neria pressed a button and it stopped not far from the exit on to the balcony. I realized they must have the magnetic tracks John was talking about even under the damned floor itself.

We all turned our attention to the object. At the touch of a switch on its side the top folded back. There underneath was a keyboard, a piano keyboard, with the usual eighty-eight keys. At the right-hand end there was a small metal lever, and nothing else.

The two girls stood waiting like expectant children at a party, just after the conjurer has arrived. For me, some conjuring would be necessary it seemed. There was no piano stool, no pedals, and the box itself just wasn’t big enough to contain any appreciable length of string.

‘Where do I sit?’

‘Haven’t you got an adjuster?’

‘No,’ said John, before I could reply.

The girls laughed. ‘Then he is going to be very uncomfortable unless we fetch one from the storage room.’

We all made quite a business of adjusting the shape of the floor to fit the position of the box. It was every bit as impressive as the usual adjustment of the piano stool. At last I decided I was comfortable enough and that my hands were in the right relation to the keyboard.

The three of them were sprawling on the floor, Melea actually at a height above me, so contoured was the room. I felt as if I was in a kind of arena. I began to play a Handel chaconne. The effect was indescribable, indescribably good and indescribably bad. Sometimes the music came through with a really wonderful tone. Then an instant later there would be the most horrible overload effect, the volume would become enormous. I stopped for a moment.

‘You’d better either adjust the control or play more lightly,’ said Neria.

I tried moving the lever. As I did so, the pressure needed on the keys to give the same volume of tone changed. I began to experiment with single notes. It was the pressure on the key that decided the volume. Any increase of pressure after a key reached its bed, any key-bedding, produced a grotesque increase of output. The mechanics of striking a single note were completely different from a piano. On the piano you get maximum output at the moment the hammer hits the strings. From that moment on, the volume of tone sags badly. A long-sustained note is impossible if you judge by an objective criterion. The thing which makes piano music possible is the curious subjective effect by which you continue to think you hear the tone after it has really sagged. Of course the manner of striking the strings makes some difference but the appalling fall-off of tonal quality is always there. Here the situation was quite different. The volume could be held steady, for seconds if necessary, simply by keeping a constant downward pressure on the key. In fact by increasing the pressure you could increase the output, exactly as a violinist can.

It took a lot of experimenting before I had the feel of it. Indeed it would be weeks or months before I would be able to get maximum effects out of this new system. In a sense it was a little like switching from piano to organ, in that the sound stopped as soon as you took your finger off the key. Unlike the organ, however, you could get a surge of tone in the middle of a note, like the thrill a violinist can produce.

When I had got the hang of individual notes I found the general tonal structure had interesting differences and interesting possibilities. It was sharper, less vague than a piano. This seemed to come from control over high harmonics particularly in the treble. The general effect was a greater clarity and a more legato quality. The harsh percussive effects of the piano could not be reproduced, they were quite lost. I found by adjusting the general output control that I could either play with the usual kind of heavy pressure, the strong finger effect I was normally used to, or I could go over to quite light fingering as one does on a harpsichord. Either way I could get the same big volume of tone. This made it possible, using light fingering, to play passages both very fast and very loud.

I had to be almost literally pulled away from this new box of tricks. Apparently a meal was ready. Incredibly it was set on the floor. The girls had made all kinds of indentations to hold the various articles and dishes. The colours of the food stood out sharply against the dark blue flooring material. It looked exactly as if a bed of flowers had been laid out. The effect was so remarkable that I felt it could not be due to chance.

It was all entirely vegetarian food. They didn’t eat animals, John had said. Yet you wouldn’t have known it. The tastes were there. In fact my only problem was there seemed to be too many tastes, almost as if you were getting the whole of a large menu all at once. The wine was very good. Apparently a span of ten thousand years made little difference so far as wine was concerned.

‘How do you like your little present? You haven’t thanked us for it yet.’

‘He is exactly like a child with it,’ said John with a tinge of jealousy.

I pressed my advantage. ‘You said you had two presents.’

‘None for me,’ muttered John. At this the girl Neria stroked his face:

‘There are better presents for you than a little black box,’ Neria smiled.

I saw John was going to have his troubles, and especially because of the way the translation system operated. It suddenly struck me how much the pronunciation of English by the girls had changed. It was now very much more like normal everyday English. My curiosity flowed over and I had to ask how it was all done, although I realized we were pretending that nothing seemed unusual to us.

‘Oh, it is really very simple,’ said Melea.

‘I would not have thought you would have had any difficulty with that,’ grinned the other girl.

John took up the challenge. ‘Let me make a guess. First you have a system of language translation set up in a computer. As well as grammatical rules, synonyms, and so forth, you have a library of mouth sounds. When a word is spoken it is analysed for its sounds, taken to pieces. Then it is put through the translation procedure. The same is done for the translated word, in reverse. It’s a matter really of having sounds as well as a dictionary. But how did you manage to change the pronunciation as you went along?’

The same thing was puzzling me.

The girls laughed: ‘Your own pronunciation was analysed, of course. As you spoke each word, the sound formation was taken to pieces. After that, when the same word was used in the translation of something that we said, it was put together in the way you had used. Now do you understand?’

John nodded, and I think I got a pretty good idea myself.

But there was still one thing that worried me. ‘How do you get the voices to sound so right?’

‘Because each of us has a library in our computer of the way our voice sounds. Not just in our own language, but of all the sounds that can be made with the human voice. By doing this our voice could be translated into any language whatever, even though we ourselves could not understand a word of it.’

‘You haven’t a library of our voices?’

‘No, we are not really using your voices at all. We’ve used the voice of one of our own people, not anybody we happen to know well personally. Otherwise it would be very strange.’

By now we had finished the meal. I was again astonished by the speed with which it was all cleared away. Just the same carpet-sweeping procedure that John had used. The really striking thing was when the white strip reached the position of the piano, or rather the piano-like box of tricks, the whole thing lifted up off the floor, and the white strip went underneath it. Thirty seconds and the room was clear. Dinner was finished.

Both girls went out. Several minutes later they came back carry­ing two large parcels which they put on top of the piano. With smiles they bowed at me and said: ‘They’re yours.’

They were the most normal articles I had yet seen, apparently straightforward parcels, wrapped in what looked uncommonly like paper. I undid the first one. It was just a large metal disc about two feet in diameter and an inch thick.

‘Handle it very carefully, please.’

John came over: ‘It must be hollow, or layers of metal. Otherwise it would be much heavier.’

It had seemed heavy enough to me. I undid the other parcel. Here there were three discs of the same diameter but less thick. The girls were watching us with amusement. John and I talked about it for some time. It was obviously connected with some sort of electronic device. But what? They were like huge, weighty gramophone records, the sort of thing a stone-age man might have produced, only they were made of bright metal not stone. We gave it up.

Melea took the biggest of the discs, while her friend went to the keyboard on the wall. I was beginning to wonder what these people would do without their walls and floors, when a metallic arm moved smoothly and slowly out of the wall. Melea fitted the disc into it and the whole thing retreated completely from view.

There was a lot to be said for not cluttering up the room with chairs and tables and a hundred and one other articles. The room might have been expected to look bare but it didn’t. This was due to the shape and the colours which somehow conveyed the impression of being out-of-doors. I realized what it was that had struck me as being so queer in the first place. Normally when you go into a building you change your sense of scale. Rooms that would seem ridiculously small if they were out-of-doors become tolerably large. What happened here was that you didn’t make any change of scale, you had the same sense of size as you have in the open air.

I just had time for these reflections before the music started. I was transfixed at the first chords. It was the beginning of the Mass I had taken three months of the winter to write. It was all there, the whole orchestra. At least it was very nearly the orchestra as I knew it. Very nearly, but not quite, the harmonic balance of the individual instruments was a little different. The music flowed on and I lost all sense of calm judgement. Listening to one’s own music is a little like listening to one’s own voice, you do it with a sense of wonder, fascination, and horror. You can’t believe it really sounds like that. The wonder now was that the instruments were all there, the notes all correct. I could detect no mistake of pitch or of timing. Indeed the timing was if anything too accurate. When the chorus came in the words were English. They were my own words.

Now we were at the section I had played in the temple, the section I had conceived of in an agony of mind. It held me now, playing on my emotions as if I, its creator, were no more than a keyboard. The pain and tragedy dissolved at last into sunlight and the work came to an end, after what seemed like a vast span of time. It was I suppose about two hours.

I knew of course what was on the other discs, the symphony and the piano pieces. I had no thought to hear them now, I wanted no more music that day. I took hold of Melea and we went out on to the balcony. There were no lights anywhere on the ground but the sky was incredibly full of stars. It was even clearer, more remote, than the Grecian sky had been.

It was like the night we had passed at the temple, last night so far as my memory was concerned. Even so there were a thousand and one questions I wanted to ask which still perturbed me, but this was not the occasion for them. The morning would come soon enough.

I woke first. Melea was still there, her face close to mine, her long hair entangling her shoulders. I lay without moving for some time, not wishing to waken her. The feeling was in part selfish for I wanted to study her face. There was natural beauty in it but not a trace of glamour. It was a face that could not have existed in the year 1966.

The eyes opened at last. There was the usual fleeting fraction of a second while the eyes come into focus and the brain comes to life.

‘Today will be a happy day,’ she said, a little sleepily. There was an emphasis on the word today which I could not understand.

It was indeed a good day. We started early, not long after sunrise. It turned out there was some reasonably shaped clothing in the house, a kind of shirt and trousers. Fashions can’t change too much simply because of the shape of the human body. The odd thing about these clothes, however, was they had no buttons or fastenings of any kind. You put them on after the style of a boiler suit, except they were very well cut and there was no zip-fastener. There was a special kind of cloth along the fastening which simply pressed against the cloth on the other side of the seam. It was like scotch-tape, except you could use it time and time again. You simply pulled it apart with a good stout tug.

After the usual frothy breakfast we called up a taxi. Unlike the taxis I was used to, it wouldn’t come to the house itself, only to the nearest taxi rank, a good mile away. There had been a heavy dew during the night which was still covering the trees, bushes, and flower beds as we walked down the hillside. The vehicle was already waiting for us. I can best describe it as a squashed sphere. The lower third of it was opaque, the rest was made of some translucent material. There was a little kiosk near by. Melea beckoned me to follow her. I watched while she tapped out what I took to be our destination on one of the inevitable keyboards. A slip of material, translucent, about six inches long by one inch wide appeared. Set within the material were about a dozen characters, apparently in metal. We got into the vehicle. Melea pulled out a rectangular sheet about two feet long. Into this she inserted the smaller slip and then replaced the sheet. Neria touched a button and instantly we began to move.

I could see now as we moved away the reason for the squashed appearance of the sphere. The vehicle itself was about fifteen feet across. The walls were rather like the kind of shop window that doesn’t seem to have any glass in it. You had the impression you were looking straight out. There was no rattle or rumble as we picked up speed. Very soon we were whistling along at what I guessed to be about eighty miles an hour. It took about two hours to our destination. We went towards the south. I could see the big mountains I had glimpsed from the balcony. They were volcanic cones, not unlike the mountains of Hawaii in fact.

‘One of them will be Popocatepetl, I suppose,’ said John.

‘They must have cleared the whole of the jungle that used to occupy these parts,’ he added.

We passed mainly through green fields. Every now and then I could see little valleys filled with flowers, like the one we had come from. I thought I could glimpse houses. Also in the distance I caught flashes of vehicles similar to the one we were travelling in. At an intersection of the pathways, or magnetic tracks, or whatever they were, we came quite close to another vehicle. The occupants waved and we waved back.

As we approached the mountains it was obvious the jungle had indeed been cleared. We went quite smoothly and silently up the mountainside. Eventually we passed from fields to grassland. It was for all the world like an alp, except there were no animals.

‘What has happened to all the animals?’

I asked this in Greek, for Greek was now our only means of communication—strange we had to work through a language that lay two thousand years in the past for me, eight thousand years in the past for the girls.

‘The situation is very sad. All the major animals were wiped out and became extinct long ago.’

‘How about the domestic animals?’

‘We no longer have any need of them. They are not here, not in our country anyway. We turned them loose in places suited to them. Many exist in a wild form like cattle and sheep, but the animal population of the Earth has become very poor. At least it was so until these new events occurred. Now we have collected them again.’

We reached our destination high on the grasslands. I could feel the altitude quite appreciably, which meant we were probably above eleven thousand feet. Grass still grew at this elevation because of the sub-tropical climate. For about three hours we climbed along a pleasant track. At last we came to rougher ground. There was a hut where we had lunch. We took exactly what we needed. I was now keenly aware that nobody ever paid for anything.

When I remarked on this to John he said, ‘Obviously this is a high-powered civilization with very few people. I imagine they could make far more than they need, so why worry about paying.’

‘To make sure people work.’

‘It’s obvious they have so many machines, so much automation, there isn’t any need for anybody to work, not in our sense. I imagine their problem must be leisure not work.’

Another party arrived, a party of six. They looked at us curiously and I thought a little sadly. I couldn’t make out why for I didn’t feel sad myself. The newcomers had a remarkable family resemblance to the two girls. These people must all look pretty much alike. The man who had appeared for a brief moment back in the temple on the mountain, he also had been remarkably like Melea. I saw now why the girls didn’t bother to glamorize themselves. If everybody looked more or less the same, there really wouldn’t be any point in it.

I asked Melea how many people there were in total. She told me about five million.

‘Over the whole Earth, only five million?’ I asked in astonishment.

‘We don’t live over the whole Earth, only in this country here.’

‘You mean the rest of the Earth is empty?’

‘Not empty but wild, in its natural state. Why should we want to live everywhere? Five millions is quite enough people to know. How many people do you know in your country, more than five million?’

‘Of course not. We make a choice of those we wish to know.’

‘There is no point in us making such a choice. Why should we want to know one person and ignore another.’

The view away to the north was tremendous as we walked back again downhill by a different path.

‘I think we must hurry,’ said Neria.

This was translated to us, with the explanation that there would be a thunderstorm about four o’clock in the afternoon. We got back to our taxi barely in time. It was a wonderful ride down the mountainside through the driving rain and the flickering lightning. Several times the lightning struck at points not far removed from us. Neither of the girls seemed at all worried about being hit ourselves. John noticed this and whispered, ‘They must have some protective field, lowering the potential a bit, near the track.’

It was amazing there was so little noise inside our sphere.

Once we quitted the vehicle back at our own valley we soon got thoroughly wet. The girls didn’t seem to mind in the least and strode along, uncaring. We followed them to a house which wasn’t ours. Quite a few people were already here. One of them showed us to what seemed to be a changing-room. There was a strong hot-air blower that dried you off completely in a couple of minutes. Then we picked ourselves a selection of garments and sealed ourselves up inside them. We took less than ten minutes but it could have been done in under three or four.

About twenty people came in that evening to what was evidently a party. It was not quite as free and easy as a party can be where everybody speaks the same language, because quite often we had to go through the translation system. Yet it was all far, far easier than attending any sort of function in a foreign country in the world of 1966. I had been right about the preparation of meals. They all made a big thing about the arrangement of the colours, into patterns like flower beds, and about the shape of the floor. They divided into two halves and had a kind of race. From the gun it took about ten minutes.

During the meal a sly game went on, of softening up the floor under one or another of us. It may sound ridiculous but it certainly looked funny, especially after a modicum of alcohol. Although everybody talked twenty to the dozen there was no appalling volume of sound. The floor, the ceiling, and the walls, were evidently sound absorbing. Yet when I had played the previous night I hadn’t had the impression of playing into a sink. It seemed as if the reflecting qualities of the room must be changeable.

After dinner the little piano suddenly appeared. It came in by itself through a doorway. There was nothing for it but that I should sing for my supper. There was a very good reason why everybody wanted to hear me. What I had already begun to suspect, that nobody in this society played any musical instrument, was confirmed. Music could be put together so readily using electronic techniques that incentive was quite lacking for anyone to go through the long years of drudgery so necessary for proficient performance.

The evening reminded me in a curiously vivid way of the party back so long ago in Los Angeles. I found myself beginning the waltz theme of the Diabelli variations. I had not played them since the night in Los Angeles. Until now I had associated Beethoven’s great masterpiece with a different time, a different age. But now the variations emerged with as much freshness as ever, and with more power than I had been able to produce on the instruments of that apparently far-off epoch.