The Seeds of Time

Pillar to Post

Forcett Mental Clinic,

Delano, Conn.

28th Feb.

To

Messrs. Thompson, Handett & Thompson,

A ttorneys-at-Law,

512 Gable Street,

Philadelphia, Pa.

Gentlemen,

In response to your request we have conducted a thorough examination of our patient, Stephen Dallboy, and have taken steps which establish his identity beyond legal question. Attested documents in support of this are enclosed, and dispose entirely of his claim to the Terence Molton property.

At the same time we admit ourselves surprised. The condition of the patient has altered quite radically since our last examination when he was indubitably feebleminded.

Indeed, but for this obsession that he is Terence Molton, which he maintains with complete consistency, we should now classify him as normal. In view of the obsession and the remarkable assertions with which he supports it we feel that he should remain here under observation for a time which may give us the opportunity of dispelling the whole fantasy system-and at the same time of clearing up several points which we find puzzling.

In order that you may more clearly understand the situation we are enclosing a copy of a statement written by the patient which we beg you to study before reading our concluding remarks.

STATEMENT-by Terence Molton

I know this is difficult to believe. In fact, when the thing first happened I didn’t believe it myself. I reckoned it was just a stage, maybe, in the deteriorating process. I’ve had dope enough long enough to play hell with my nervous system-yet the funny thing was how real it seemed right away. Still, I thought, that’s likely the way of it; I reckon everything would seem real to De Quincey when he was under, and to Coleridge, too.

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw …

Vision is a poor word-all quality and no quantity. How strong was that vision? Could he put out his hand and touch that damsel? He heard her sing, but did she speak to him? And did he find himself a new man, free from pain? I guess even honeydew and the milk of Paradise are relative. There’ll be fellows who are yearning for a kind of celestial Hollywood, but, for me, just having no pain and being complete was paradise right then.

It was just over four years since that cannon shell had got me-four years, nine operations, and more to come, for, with all their carving, they’d not stopped the trouble yet. And what good was that to me? Interesting for the doctors, no doubt, but it had brought me to being just a hulk in a chair, with the only one half of one leg under the rug. And they said: ‘Go easy on the dope!’ I should laugh. If they’d given me anything else to keep the pain away, maybe I would. But if they’d stopped letting me have the dope then I’d have killed myself. They knew that.

I don’t blame Sally for calling it off. Some of them thought I felt sore about that, but I didn’t-not after the first. The sample I’d offered her was a healthy young man-what was delivered from hospital was pretty different from the sample. Poor Sally. It nearly broke her up. I reckon she’d have tried it out of mistaken loyalty if I’d pressed her. But I was thanking God I hadn’t-at least I hadn’t that on my conscience.

They tell me her husband’s a good guy, and the baby’s cute. That’s the way it should be.

All the same, when every woman you see is kind to you -in much the same way as she would be to a sick dog….

Oh, well, there was always the dope.

And then, when I wasn’t expecting anything at all except rotting slowly, there was this … this … vision.

I’d had a bad day. My right leg was hurting a lot, and my left foot. But as most of the right leg was taken off and thrown to the sharks four years ago, and the left foot had to go, too, a little later, there wasn’t a lot to be done about it.

I’d been keeping the dope down because I still sometimes got an idea that I’d be acquiring virtue by holding off when I wanted it-I wasn’t, of course; I was acquiring nothing but bad temper, and radiating it, too, but you get brought up with these ideas, and they keep on cropping up again. Ten o’clock was to be my limit, I’d decided, and I kept to it. For the last quarter hour I watched the big hand snailing, then I watched the second-hand crawling, then I reached for the bottle.

Maybe I took a little more than usual, but the moment I had taken it I was telling myself what a damn fool I had been to wait. I’d gained nothing. It was just a variation of those limit-setting games kids invent for themselves. For all the difference it made to anyone else I might as well be doped up to the eyes all the time. Wonderful, it was. Blissful. I lay back, feeling as if I’d never rested like that before. The pain faded out, and all feeling with it. I seemed to float smoothly and gently up and away. I was disembodied, boundless, and filled with a surging lightness. The day must have made me pretty tired, I guess, because I could feel myself falling asleep before I’d properly got round to enjoying it.

When I opened my eyes, there, in front of me, was the vision of the damsel. She hadn’t a dulcimer, and she certainly did not look Abyssinian, but she was singing, very quietly. It was an odd song, and for all I knew it might have been about Mount Abora, for I couldn’t understand a word of it. We were in a room-well, yes, it was a room, though it was rather like being inside a bubble. It was all cool green, with a pearly iridescence, and the walls curving up so that you couldn’t tell where they became ceiling. There were two arched openings in the sides. Through them were tree tops, and a patch of blue sky. Close to one of them the girl was riddling with something I couldn’t see. She glanced towards me, and saw that my eyes were open. She turned, and said something that sounded like a question, but it meant absolutely nothing to me. I just looked back at her. She was worth looking at. A tall, beautifully proportioned figure, with brown hair caught back by a ribbon. The material of her dress was diaphanous, yet there was a vast amount of it, arranged in multitudes of cunning folds. It made me think of the pre-Raphaelites’ versions of the classical, and it must have been cobweb-light, for as she moved it swirled and hesitated in mid air. The result was rather like that frozen high-wind effect so popular in later Greek sculpture.

When I did not reply, she frowned a little and repeated her question-or so it seemed. I did not pay a lot of attention to the words. As a matter of fact I was thinking: ‘Well, that’s that. I’ve had it,’ and deciding that I was now in some kind of ante-room to heaven, or-well, anyway, an ante-room. I wasn’t scared; not even greatly surprised. I remember feeling, ‘Good, that’s a nasty experience finished with,’ and wondering a little that the prelude to eternity should so favour certain Victorian schools of painting.

When I still did not answer, her dark eyes widened a little. There was a look of wonder in them, perhaps a slight tinge of alarm, as she came towards me. Slowly she said:

‘You-are-not-Hymorell?’

Her English had a strange accent, and anyway I did not know what hymorell meant. I might be, or I might not. She went on:

‘Not-Hymorell ? Some-other-person ?’

It sounded as if Hymorell should be a name.

‘I’m Terry,’ I told her. ‘Terry Molton.’

There was a block of the green stuff near me. It looked hard, but she sat down on it, and stared at me. Her expression was half-disbelief, mixed with surprise.

By this time I was beginning to discover myself. I was lying on a long couch with some kind of coverlet over me. Experimentally I moved what ought to be my right leg-and the coverlet moved, too, right down to the foot. There wasn’t any pain, either. I sat up suddenly, and excitedly, feeling my legs, both of them. Then I did a thing I’d not let myself do in years-I burst into tears….

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:

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice.

But when we did get there it wasn’t that. It rose before us like an artificial mountain. We swept into it through an entrance sixty yards wide, and several hundred feet high to emerge into a central hall of staggering size. There was no suggestion whatever of ‘pleasure-dome,’ though something of the ‘caves of ice’ feeling came from the translucency of the pearly walls. More slowly, and seeming to drift like a feather in a draught, we floated across the place. There were a few men and women walking in a leisurely fashion, and a few chairs gliding as our own did. Beyond the great hall we passed through passages and lesser halls until we came to one where a dozen or so men and women were gathered and apparently awaiting us. There the chair stopped. It lowered the few inches to the floor, we got out, whereupon, by some mysterious agency it lifted just clear, and drifted away to the wall. Clytassamine spoke to the group of people and indicated me. They nodded gravely in my direction. It seemed the polite thing to do to nod back. Then, with her as interpreter, a kind of catechism began.

I think it was during that questioning that I really began to feel that there was something seriously wrong with my dream. They wanted to know my name, where I came from, what I did, when I did it, and a great deal more, and the answers I gave caused them pauses from time to time to confer. It was all very logical and detailed-that was what was wrong. Dreams-my dreams, at any rate-have a more cinematic quality. They do not proceed in smooth sequence, but jump rather suddenly from one scene to another as though a not quite sane director somewhere were ordering Take!’ and ‘Cut!’ when he felt like it. But this was not at all that way. I was acutely aware of what was going on, both physically and mentally….

Progress was slow on account of Clytassamine’s indifferent English, but we made enough of it to produce longer and more involved conferences. At last she said:

“They-wish-you-learn-language. More-easy-to-speak.’

‘That’s going to take a long time,’ I said, for no word that any of them had yet spoken had the least familiar relation for me.

‘No. Few-thlana.’

I looked blank.

‘Quarter-day,’ she explained.

They gave me some food first-a box of things which looked like candies and tasted good, but not sweet.

‘Now-sleep,’ said Clytassamine, pointing to a cold, unfriendly looking block.

I got on it, and found that it was neither chill nor hard. I lay wondering if this was the end of it and I would wake up to find myself back in my own bed with the old pain where my legs ought to be. But I didn’t wonder long-maybe there was something in the food.

When I woke up I was still there. Hanging over me was a kind of canopy of rose-coloured metal which had not been there before. It was-but I am going to give up attempting to describe things. Frankly, I could understand about one per cent of what I saw, so what is the use? There was too much basic unfamiliarity. What would an ancient Egyptian know of a telephone by looking at it? What would a Roman or a Greek make of a jet plane, or of radio? Or, coming right down to the simple things, if you saw a slab of chocolate for the first time you might think it was for mending shoes, lighting the fire, or building houses-about the last thing you’d think was that that hard brown rectangle was meant for eating-and when you did find it out, you’d most likely try eating soap, too, because the texture was similar and the colour was more attractive. That’s the way it was with me.

You grow up with your network of thinking patterns on an acquired foundation. You look at a machine, almost subconsciously you say to yourself ‘Ah, that works by steam, or oil, or electricity’ and you go on from there. But nearly all of what I was seeing now was fundamentally foreign to me. I’d no place to start, and, not understanding what might bite me or burn me any minute, I was scared of it-just like a child or a backward aboriginal. Naturally I floundered around with wild guesses, but mostly they had to remain just that. I guessed now, for instance, that the canopy was a part of a hypnotic teaching machine such as I’d heard of people trying to develop. I guessed that because I found I could now understand what the people were saying-some of it-but of the how or the why, I knew nothing. In some way I had acquired an understanding of the language they spoke, but the concepts that were behind it did not necessarily follow….

I knew just what I could translate. The word thlana that Clytassamine had used I now knew for a measure of time-one hour and twelve minutes, making twenty thlana to the day-and dool was electricity, but laythal meant nothing to me. I had to work it out that it was some form of power unknown to me, so that I had no equivalent to translate it to.

This certainly had the effect of enhancing the dream-like quality. The utter blankness of certain words, which kept on cropping up like the dumb notes on a bar-room piano, began to get me more bewildered than before. After a bit, my distress must have begun to show pretty plainly because they laid off questioning, and told Clytassamine to take me away and look after me. My mind was whirling so much with the attempts to understand that the relief was almost physical as I sat down beside her again, and I sighed in relaxation when the seat floated us back once more into the open air.

Before I understood anything about this world I was immensely impressed by Clytassamine’s power of mental adjustment. It seemed to me that it must be a frightening thing to find that one whom you have known intimately has suddenly become a perfect stranger-with, maybe, unpredictable reactions. Yet she showed no alarm, and only occasionally made the slip of calling me Hymorell.

I understood why somebody recovering consciousness usually demands first of all ‘Where am I?’ I wanted to know that very much; without some relation to my circumstances I didn’t seem to be able to get my thinking started properly. There was no fixed point to begin from. When we were back in the green room again I began to ask questions. She looked at me doubtfully.

‘You should rest. Simply relax and don’t worry. We will look after you. If I were to try to explain I would only bewilder you more.’

‘You couldn’t.’ I told her. ‘Nothing could. I’ve got to the stage where I can’t pretend this is a dream any longer. I’ve got to get some kind of orientation, or go crazy.’

She looked at me closely again, and then nodded.

‘Very well. But where am I to begin? What is most urgent?’

‘I want to know where I am, who I am, and how it happened.’

‘As to who you are, you know that. You told me you are Terry Molton.’

‘But this-‘ I slapped my left thigh ‘-this isn’t Terry Molton.’

‘Temporarily it is,’ she said. ‘It was Hymorell’s body, but now everything that makes it individual-mentality, personality, character-are yours: therefore it is Terry’s body.’

‘And Hymorell?’ I asked.

‘He has transferred to what was your body.’

‘Then he’s made a remarkably bad deal,’ I told her. I thought for a moment, then:

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘Disposition isn’t constant. I know that. I’m not the same as I was before I was shot up, for instance. Physical differences make mental differences. Personality largely depends on the equilibrium of the glands. Injuries, and dope, changed mine to some extent-if they’d done it more I’d have quite a different personality.’

‘Who told you that?’ she asked.

‘It’s a matter of scientific knowledge-and common sense,’ I told her.

‘And your scientists postulate no constant? Surely there must be some constant factor to be affected by changes? And if there is that factor, may it not be a cause rather than simply an effect?’

‘As I understand it, it’s simply a matter of balance-an affair of forces held in equilibrium.’

‘Then you don’t understand it,’ she told me.

‘Oh,’ I said.

I decided to drop that angle for the moment.

‘What is this place?’ I asked.

‘The building is called Cathalu,’ she said.

‘No. I mean where is it? Is it on Earth? It looks like Earth, all right-but no where that I ever heard of.’

‘Of course it’s Earth-where else would it be? But it’s in a different salany,’ she said.

I looked back at her, up against one of those dumb words once more. Salany meant just nothing to me.

‘Do you mean it’s in a different ?’ I began, and then I stopped, baffled. There didn’t seem to be a word in her language for ‘time’-at least not in the sense I was wanting it.

‘I told you it would be bewildering,’ she said. ‘You think differently. In terms of old thinking-as near as I can understand it-you came from one end of the human race, now you are at the other.’

‘But I don’t,’ I protested. There were some twenty million years of human evolution before me.’

‘Oh, that!’ she said, airily dismissing those twenty million years with a wave of her hand.

‘Well, at least,’ I went on, rather desperately, ‘you can tell me how I got here.’

‘Roughly, yes. It is an experiment of Hymorell’s. He has been trying for a long time-‘ [and in this straightforward, day to day, sense, I noticed, there did seem to be a word for time] ‘-but now he has made a new approach-a successful one at last. Several times before he has almost done it, but the transfer did not hold. His most successful attempts until now were about three generations ago. He ‘

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

She looked questioningly.

‘I thought you said he tried three generations ago?’

‘So I did,’ she agreed.

I got up from the block I’d been sitting on, and looked out of the arched windows. It was a peaceful, sunny, normal looking day out there.

‘Maybe you were right. I’d better rest,’ I said.

‘That’s sensible,’ she agreed. ‘Don’t bother your head about the hows and whys. After all, you won’t be here long.’

‘You mean, I’ll be going back-to be as I was?’

She nodded.

I could feel my body under the unfamiliar robe. It was a good body, strong, well kept, lithe, whole-and there was no pain in it any place….

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t know where I am, or what I am now, but one thing I do know-and that is that I’m not going back to the hell where I was.’

She just looked at me a little sadly, and shook her head slowly.

The next day, after we had fed on more of the candies that were not candies, and drunk an elusively flavoured milky stuff, she led the way into the hall, and towards the chairs. I stopped.

‘Can’t we walk?’ I said. ‘It’s a long time since I walked.’

‘Why, yes, of course,’ she agreed, and we turned towards the doorway.

Several people spoke to her, and one or two of them to me. There was curiosity in their eyes, but their manners were kindly, as though to set a stranger at ease. It was evident that they knew I was not Hymorell, yet apparently I was not sensational. Outside, we walked across rough grass and found a path leading through a spinney. It was quiet, peaceful, Arcadianly beautiful. To me, now feeling the very ground beneath my feet as something precious, everything had the freshness of spring. The blood livened in my veins in a way that I had forgotten.

‘Wherever it is, it’s lovely,’ I said.

‘Yes, it is lovely,’ she agreed.

We walked on in silence for a while, then my curiosity came back.

‘What did you mean by “the other end of the race”?’ I asked her.

‘Just that. We think we are coming to the end, finishing. We are practically sure of it-though there is always chance.’ I looked at her.

‘I have never seen anyone more healthy, or more beautiful,’ I said.

She smiled.

‘It’s a nice body,’ she agreed. ‘My best, I think.’

For the moment I ignored that baffling addition.

“Then what is happening-it is infertility?’ I asked.

‘No. There are not a great many children, but that is more a result than a cause. It is that something in us is failing to reproduce-the thing that makes us human instead of just animal-we call it malukos.’

The word gave me an impression akin to a spirit or a soul, yet not quite either.

‘Then the children ?’

‘They nearly all of them lack that. They are-feeble- minded,’ she said. ‘If things go on this way they will all be like that one day-and then it will be over.’

I pondered that, feeling that I was back in the dream again.

‘How long has this been happening?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. One doesn’t think of the salany arithmetically-though there is the perimetrical approach.’

I let her have best over that.

‘Surely there are records?’ I said.

‘Oh, yes. That is how Hymorell and I learned your language. But there are very big gaps. Five times at least the race all but destroyed itself. There are thousands of years missing from the records at different salany.’

‘And how long is it going to be before it is all finished?’ I asked.

‘We don’t know that, either. Our task is to prolong it because there is always chance. It may happen that the intelligence factors will become strong again.’

‘How do you mean, “prolong it”? Prolong your own lives?’

‘Yes, we transfer. When a body begins to fail, or when it is fifty years old or so, and getting past its best, we choose one of the feeble-minded, and transfer to that. This,’ she added, holding up her perfect hand, and studying it, ‘is my fourteenth body. It’s a very nice one.’

I agreed. ‘But do you mean you can go on and on transferring?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes-as long as there are bodies to transfer to.’

‘But-but that’s immortality.’

‘No,’ she said, scornfully, ‘nothing like it. It is just prolongation. Some day, sooner or later, there’ll be an accident -that’s mathematically inevitable. It might have been a hundred years ago, or it might be tomorrow ‘

‘Or a thousand years hence?’ I suggested.

‘Exactly, but one day it will come.’

‘Oh,’ I said. That seemed pretty near immortality to me. I did not for a moment doubt that she was telling me the truth. By this time I was prepared for any fantastic thing. All the same, I revolted against it. I had an instinctive sense of disapproval-prejudice, of course, the same prejudice which made me disapprove of the soft, flowing garments and the soft, easy manner of life: there is a hangover of the old Puritan censor in all of us. I couldn’t help feeling that the process she spoke of was allied to cannibalism-in some symbolic fashion. She must have read my expression, for she said, explaining, not excusing:

‘This body wasn’t any good to the girl who had it. I don’t suppose she was really even conscious of it. It was being wasted. I shall look after it. I shall have children. Some of them may be normal human children, then when they grow old they will be able to transfer. The urge to survival still exists, you see-something may happen, someone may make a discovery to save us even now.’

‘And the girl who had this body? What happened to her?’

‘Well, there wasn’t very much there beyond a few instincts. What there was changed places with me.’

‘Into a body aged fifty?-Losing thirty years of life?’

‘Can you call it loss when she was incapable of using it?’

I did not reply to that, for a thought had struck me like a sudden illumination.

‘So that’s what Hymorell was working on! He was trying to extend this transference-to operate it at, well, long range. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why I’m here?’

She looked at me steadily.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s been successful at last. It is a real transference this time.’

I thought it over. I was strangely unsurprised. I suppose I had been working up to the realization before it actually came. But there was a lot I wanted to know about the why and how as it affected me. I asked her for more details. ‘Hymorell wanted to get as far as possible,’ she told me.

‘The limit was the point where he could be sure of assembling the parts to make an instrument that would get him back here. If he went too far, certain essential metals would not be known, instruments would be inaccurate, electric power unavailable. In that case it might take him years to build the instrument, if he could do it at all. The knowledge of nuclear fission was the line he decided to draw. Further away than that, he thought, might be dangerous. Then he had to find a contact. It had to be a subject where the integration was not good-where there was a lesion weakening the attachment of the personality to the physical shape. When we perform the operation we can prepare the subject, so it is easy, but he had to find one already in a suitable state. Unfortunately, those he could find were nearly all on the point of death, but he found you at last, and then he had to study the strength of your tie. He was puzzled because it fluctuated a great deal.’

‘That would be the dope?’ I suggested.

‘Possibly. Anyway, he worked out a rhythmic incidence of lesion, and then tried. This is the result.’

‘I see,’ I said, and thought awhile. ‘How long did he reckon it was going to take him to build the instrument for his return?’

‘He couldn’t tell that. It depends on his facilities for assembling materials.’

‘Then it’s going to take him quite a while, I’d say. A legless cripple wasn’t a convenient subject to choose, from that point of view.’

‘But he’ll do it,’ she said.

‘Not if I can help it,’ I told her.

She shook her head. ‘Once you have transferred you never can have the perfect integration you had with your own original body. If at no other time, he will put on more power and get at you when you’re sleeping.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ I said.

Afterwards I saw the instrument that he had used for the transfer. It was not large. In appearance it was little more than a liquid-filled lens mounted upon a box the size of a portable typewriter from which there protruded two polished, metal handles. But within the box there was such an intricacy of wiring, tubes, and strange whizzits as to fill me with great satisfaction. No one, I reckoned, was going to knock a thing like that together in a few days, or even a few weeks.

The days drifted the life by with them. That placidity which was their chief characteristic was, at first, restful; after that there came periods when I wanted to go wild and break up something just for the diversion. Clytassamine took me here and there in the great green building. There were concerts at which I understood not a thing. I sat there, bored and musing to myself, while around me the audience went into an intellectual trance, finding something in the strange scales and queerer harmonies that was utterly beyond my perception. And there was one hall where colours played on a large fluorescent screen. They seemed to be projected from the spectators themselves in some incomprehensible way. Everybody but me enjoyed it, you could feel that, and now and then, for no reason that I could perceive, they would all sigh or laugh together. Nevertheless, I thought some of the effects very pretty, and said so; by the way it was received it was the wrong thing to say. Only in the performances of three-dimensionally projected plays was I occasionally able to follow the action for a while, and when I thought I could, it usually shook me badly. Clytassamine became short with my comments. ‘How can you expect to feel when you measure civilized behaviour by primitive taboos?’ she asked, curtly.

She took me to a museum. It was not like any I had thought of, being mostly a collection of instruments projecting sound or images, or both, according to selection. I saw some horrible things. We went back, back, and still further back.

I wanted to see or hear something of my own time, but: ‘There’s only sound,’ she said. ‘No images from so far away.’ ‘All right,’ I told her. ‘Some music.’ She worked at the keyboard of the machine. Into that great hall a familiar sound stole softly and mournfully. As I listened to it I had a sense of emptiness and vast desolation. Memories flooded back as if the old world-not, oddly enough, that which I had left, but that in which I was a child-were suddenly round me. A wave of sentimentality, of overwhelming self-pity and nostalgia, for all the hopes and joys and childhood that had vanished, utterly engulfed me, and the tears streamed down my face. I did not go to that museum again. And the music which conjured a whole world up from the aged dust?-No, it was not a Beethoven symphony, nor a Mozart concerto: it was, I confess, ‘The Old Folks at Home.’…

‘Do you never work? Does nobody work?’ I asked Clytassamine.

‘Oh, yes-if he wants to,’ she said.

‘But what about the unpleasant things-the things that must be done?’

‘What things?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘Well, growing food, providing power, disposing of waste, all that kind of thing.’

She looked surprised.

‘Why, naturally, the machines do all that. You wouldn’t expect men to do those things. Good heavens, what have we got brains for?’

‘But who looks after the machines-keeps them in order?’

‘Themselves, of course. A mechanism that couldn’t maintain itself wouldn’t be a machine, it would be just a form of tool, wouldn’t it?’

‘Oh,’ I said. And I suppose that was so, though the thought was new to me.

‘Do you mean to say,’ I went on, ‘that for your fourteen generations-some four hundred years or so-you’ve done nothing but this?’

‘Well, I’ve had quite a lot of babies-and three of them were quite normal. And I’ve worked on eugenic research from time to time-almost everybody does that when he thinks he’s got a new lead, but it never does lead anywhere.’

‘But how can you stand it-just going on and on?’

‘It is not easy sometimes-and some of us do give up, but that is a crime, because there is always chance. And it’s not quite so monotonous as you think. Each transfer makes a difference. You feel as if the world had become a different place then. The spirit rises in you like sap in spring…. And those glands you think so much of are not entirely without effect, because you are never quite the same person with quite the same tastes. Even in one body tastes can change quite a lot in one lifetime, and they inevitably differ slightly between bodies. But you are the same person, you have your memory, yet you are young again, you’re hopeful, the world looks brighter, you think you’ll be wiser this time….

And then you fall in love again, just as sweetly and foolishly as before. It’s wonderful-like a re-birth. You can only know just how wonderful if you have been fifty, and then become twenty.’

‘I can guess,’ I said. ‘I was something worse than fifty before this happened. But love!… For four years I haven’t dared to think of love….’

‘You dare now,’ she said. ‘Daren’t you …?’

There was so much I wanted to know.

‘What happened to my world?’ I asked her. ‘It seemed pretty well headed for disaster, as I saw it. I suppose it nearly wiped itself out in some vast global war?’

‘Oh dear, no. It just died-the same way as all the early civilizations. Nothing spectacular.’

I thought of my world, its intricacies and complexities. The mastery of distance and speed; the progress of science.

‘ “Just died”!’ I repeated. ‘That’s not good enough. It can’t have “just died” like that. There must have been something that broke it up.’

‘Oh, no. It died of Government-paternalism. The passion for order is a manifestation of the deep desire for security. The desire is natural-but the attainment is fatal. There was the means to produce a static world, and a static world was achieved. When the need for a new adaptation arose it found itself enmeshed in order. Unable to adapt, it inertly died of discouragement-it had happened to many primitive peoples before.’

She had no reason to lie, but it was hard to believe.

‘We hoped for so much. Everything was opening before us. We were learning. We were going to reach out to other planets and beyond….’ I said.

‘Ingenious you certainly were-like monkeys. But you neglected your philosophers-to your own ruin. Each new discovery was a toy. You never considered its true worth. You just pushed it into your system-a system already suffering from hardening of the arteries. And you were a greedy people. You took each discovery as if it were a bright new garment, but when you put it on you wore it over your old, verminous rags. You had grave need of disinfectants.’

‘That’s rather hard on us-and sweeping. We had very complex problems.’

‘Mostly concerned with preservation of forms and habits. It never seems to have occurred to you that in Nature life is growth, and preservation is an accident…. What is preserved in the rocks or in ice is only the image of life, but you were always regarding local taboos as eternal verities, and attempting to preserve them.’

My mind switched suddenly to my present situation.

‘But suppose I were to go back and tell them what is going to happen. It would alter things. Doesn’t that show I’m not going back?’ I said.

She smiled. ‘You think they would listen to you while they neglect philosophers, Terry?’

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t arise. I don’t intend to go back. I don’t like your world. I think it is decadent, and in many ways immoral, but at least I am a whole human being here.’

She smiled again. ‘So young, Terry. So sure of right and wrong. It’s rather sweet.’

‘It’s not sweet at all,’ I said, brusquely. ‘There have to be standards-without standards where are you?’

‘Well, where are you? Where’s a tree, or a flower, or a butterfly.’

‘We’re more than plants or animals.’

‘But not godlike in our judgments. What do you do about opposing standards?-Go gloriously to war?’

I dropped that.

‘Did we get to other planets?’ I asked.

‘No, but the next civilization did. They found Mars too old for us, and Venus too young. You had a dream of men spreading out over the universe; I’m afraid that never happened, though it was tried again later. They bred men specially for it as they bred them for all kinds of things. In fact they produced some very strange men and women, highly specialized. They were even more zealous for order than your people-they would not admit chance, which is a great foolishness. When their end came it was disastrous…. None of the specialized types could survive. The population dwindled down to a few hundred thousand who had enough adaptability left to start over again.’

‘So you have come to distrust order-and standards?’

‘We have ceased to think of society as a structural engineering problem, or of individuals as components for assembly into some arbitrary pattern.’

‘And you just sit and wait supinely for the end?’

‘Oh dear, no. We preserve ourselves as materials for chance to work on. Life was an accident in the beginning, survival has often been an accident. Perhaps there’ll be no more accidents-on the other hand, there may be.’

‘That sounds very near defeatism.’

‘In the end, defeat, and the cold, must come. First to the system, then the galaxy, then the universe, and the rest will be silence. Not to admit that is a foolish vanity.’ She paused. ‘Yet one grows flowers because they are lovely-not because one wishes them to live for ever.’

I did not like that world. It was foreign in its very thought-streams. The strain to understand was constant and wearisome-it was also unprofitable. All the comfort and ease I had there were centred in Clytassamine. For her I pulled down the barriers I had so bitterly erected around myself in the last few years, and I fell the more deeply in love on account of them.

Thus there was a second reason not to let things happen tamely as Hymorell had envisaged. Even Clytassamine could not make the place heaven, but I had got out of hell, and intended to stay out. It was on account of that that I spent unnumbered hours poring over the transference machine, learning all I could of it. My progress was slow, but some idea of the way it operated did begin at last to come to me.

But I could not settle. The feeling of transience would not leave me, and the days began to pass in long nagging uncertainty. There was no way of telling whether Hymorell would be successful in getting all the parts he needed. I had a haunting, mind’s eye picture of him in my wheel-chair working away all the time on the contrivance which would condemn me to suffering in that broken body again. As the weeks went by the strain began to affect me, and I grew nervy. I began to reach the point where I was afraid to go to sleep lest the next time I woke I should find myself back in that chair.

Clytassamine, too, began to look worried. I wished I could be quite sure what she was worried about. Her emotions must have been confused. She undoubtedly had some affection for me-with a slightly maternal flavour to it, and an air of responsibility. Her genuine sympathy over my distress at the idea of going back was cut across by her feeling for Hymorell who must now be suffering what I had. There was also the point that my mental strain wasn’t doing my temporary mortal tenement any good, either.

And then, when six uneventful months had begun to give me hope, it happened. It did so without sign or warning. I went to sleep in the room of the great green building: I woke back home-with a raging pain in my missing leg. All was just as it had been-so much so that I reached right away for the dope bottle.

When I grew calmer I found that there was something there which had not been before. It was on the table beside me, looking like a radio-set partially assembled. I certainly had not built it. But for that, the whole thing might have been a dream.

I leant back in my chair, considering that mass of wiring very carefully. Then I started to examine it closely, touching nothing. It was, of course, crude in construction compared with the transference machine I had studied in the place that Clytassamine had called Cathalu, but I began to see similarities and notice adaptations. I was still looking at it when I fell asleep. By the hours I slept I reckoned that Hymorell must have been driving my body at considerable pressure.

When I awoke, I began to think hard. My spell of soundness and health had left me with one firm decision-I would not remain as I was now. There were two ways out. The first had always been there for the taking-and still was. But now, there was the transference instrument. I did not understand a lot about it. I doubted whether I could successfully re-tune it if I tried-and I did not wish to try. For one thing, little as I liked that other world, Clytassamine would be there to help me; for another, what I had learned made me think that I might easily land in circumstances even less desirable. So I left it on HymorelFs setting.

The chief difficulty I foresaw was that the machine must remain. He had had to leave it, but never guessed, I suppose, that I should be able to use it. And if I were to use it, I should have to leave it there for him to use again. My object must be to stop him doing that. It would be risky to set the machine to destroy itself. The process is to some extent hypnotic, and by no means instantaneous. Something very queer indeed would be likely to happen if it were destroyed while the transmission was in progress. Besides, he would be able to build another. As long as he existed he would be able to build another…. That made the answer fairly obvious….

When I had made my plan I tried the instrument several times, but he was well integrated and aware of himself. I saw that I should have to catch him asleep, as he had caught me, so I went on trying at intervals of four hours.

I don’t know whether he outguessed me or whether he was just lucky. I had got hold of the poison a year before, to keep by me in case things got too bad. My first idea was to swallow it in a capsule which would take some little time to dissolve. But then I got to thinking what would happen if something should go wrong and I could not make the transfer in time, so I scared myself off that scheme.

Instead, I poured the poison into the dope bottle. The crystals were white, just like the dope itself, only a little larger.

Once I got a response from the instrument it was easier than I had expected. I took hold of the two handles, and concentrated all my attention on the lens. I felt giddy, the room swayed and blurred, when it cleared I was back in that green room, with Clytassamine beside me. I reached my hand towards her, and then stopped, for I could hear her quietly crying. I had never known her do that before.

‘What is it, Clya? What is the matter?’ I asked. For a moment she went absolutely quiet. Then she said, incredulously:

‘It’s-it’s not Terry?’

‘But it is. I told you I was not going to be sent back there,’ I assured her.

She drew in her breath. Then she started to cry again, but differently. I put my arm round her. After a while I asked:

‘Clya, what is it? What’s all this about?’

She sniffled. ‘It’s Hymorell. Your world’s done something dreadful to him. When he came back he was harsh and bitter. He kept on talking of pain and suffering, and he was-cruel.’

It did not greatly surprise me. They knew little or nothing of illness or physical discomfort. If a body became in the least defective, they transferred. They had never had to learn the hard way.

‘Why didn’t it do that to you, too?’ she asked.

‘I think it did at first,’ I admitted. ‘But one has to learn that that doesn’t help much.’

‘I was afraid of him. He was cruel,’ she repeated.

I kept myself awake for forty-eight hours, to make sure. I knew that one of the first things he would need when he woke was the dope, but there was no sense in taking chances. Then I let myself sleep.

When I opened my eyes, I was back here. It was no slow awakening. I knew in a flash that he had somehow suspected that dope, and avoided it. The instrument was beside me, and I saw a thin curl of smoke rising from it as though a cigarette had been left burning. I began to reach towards it, but then caution checked me. I caught the leads, and pulled them out. In among the wiring I found a small can with a glowing fuse attached. I flung the thing hastily through the window. He too, however, had had to allow a safety margin: it was half an hour before it went off.

I looked at the dope. I was needing it badly, but I didn’t dare to touch it. I trundled my chair over to the cupboard where the spare supply was kept. But when I took out the bottle, I hesitated. It looked like the real stuff, and intact -but, then, of course, it was essential that it should.

Deliberately I threw it into the fireplace, smashing the bottle, and wheeled my chair to the telephone. The doctor was pretty short with me, but he came, bringing the stuff with him, thank God.

Various plans occurred to me. A poisoned needle, for instance, set strategically in the arm of the chair. Or some infection which would take a few days to develop-but that was too risky on account of possible delays. And over the former I was up against a problem which also balked several other ideas. The disabled have so little privacy. It is difficult enough to get the deadlier poisons, anyway: when it has to be done by finding a third party ready to flout the law, it becomes virtually impossible. And if someone did do it for me he would later appear as an accessory to suicide. The same objection applied to my laying hands on a few sticks of dynamite. But I could buy a time switch without many questions-and I did.

It was, I thought, a neat arrangement. My old service pistol was trained on the exact position my head would occupy when I was at the instrument. Only if you were searching for it would you notice the muzzle looking out from ‘the bookshelves. It was fixed to fire when the two handles of the instrument were grasped-but not until the time-switch had gone in. Thus I could set the switch and operate the instrument. Two hours later, for safe margin, the switch would go over, and the thing become lethal. If I tried and failed to make contact, I had only to set the switch again.

I waited three days, reckoning that Hymorell would be as chary of sleep as I had been, and uncertain whether his little grenade had been successful. Then I tried, successfully. -But three days later I was back again in my chair. Hymorell, damn him, was too cautious. He must have spotted the extra lead to the switch right away. It had been snipped off…. But I found his little surprise-packet, too-I would have melted the instrument, and most likely myself, too, if I had touched it before disconnecting. (The switch was thermostatic this time, set to cut in as the room cooled down-very neat.) The pistol and the time-switch had vanished, and I set about looking for them everywhere within range of my chair. I didn’t find the pistol, but the switch was in the cupboard under the stairs. It was arranged to set off a percussion cap which would ignite a grey powder obviously taken from the pistol cartridges. There was paper and oily rag close by.

Once I had made sure there were no other booby traps around, I settled down to work out another little reception device of my own. There used to be a type of mine that the Germans used which didn’t go up until the seventh truck had passed over it. The idea had points. I spent a couple of days fixing that, and then turned to the transference instrument again.

I was getting sick of the game, but it seemed to be a duel which could only end with one of us outsmarting the other. But while I was keeping awake for a couple of days and trying to look ahead to what he might have laid for me if my present little gimmick failed to catch him, I had an idea. I took it to Clytassamine.

‘Look here,’ I said. ‘Suppose I were to transfer to one of the feeble-minded the way you people do. Then when he operates again, it will be the half-wit who will take my place in the chair. We’ll both be here and the whole thing will be solved.’

She shook her head. ‘You need some sleep, Terry. You’re getting fuddled. It’s your mind he’s working the exchange with. It wouldn’t make any difference what kind of body you were using.’

She was right, of course. I was fuddled. On the third day I just had to sleep, come hell or high water. I slept for about fourteen of their hours-and woke up in the same place. That was great. I couldn’t believe he’d let that length of time pass without making an attempt if he were in a state to do so. There was justification for believing that my little gadget had brought it off this time, and at last I began to feel easier.

As the days went on, I began to grow sure. After the first half dozen times my dread of sleep diminished. At last I began to feel like a citizen of this other world, and to look for my place in it. With unlimited time ahead of me I didn’t intend to spend it hanging around the way the rest of them did.

‘Maybe there is only chance now,’ I said to Clytassamine, ‘but did you never hear of making chances?’

She smiled, but, it seemed to me, a little wearily.

‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘I know. I felt like that for my first two generations. You are so young, Terry.’ She sat looking at me wistfully, and a little sadly.

Why the change should suddenly have come over me then, I can’t say. Maybe it wasn’t that sudden, and had been working up awhile, but as I looked back at her I found myself seeing her quite differently, and a cold feeling came over me. For the first time I saw beyond her perfect form and young loveliness. Inside, she was old-old and wearied-old, too, far beyond my reach. She thought of me as a child, and had been treating me as one. The vigour of my true youth had amused her-perhaps she had found that it revived her own for a while. Now she was tired of it-and of me. I saw that in the moment I fell out of love with her, in that moment when her charm turned to experienced sophistication, and every gesture showed as something practised and known. I knew that the freshness I saw was nothing but a sham. I must have stared at her quite a while.

‘You don’t want me any more,’ I told her. ‘I’ve ceased to be amusing. You want Hymorell.’

‘Yes, Terry,’ she said, quietly.

For the next day or two I pondered over what to do. I had never liked that world. It was effete and decaying. And now what pleasantness there had been had vanished. I felt imprisoned, stifled, appalled at the prospect of spending several lifetimes in it. Now that a return to my former torments seemed improbable, the prospect here looked, in another way, little, if any better. For the first time I began to wonder whether finiteness wasn’t one of life’s more important qualities. I quailed miserably at the prospect of an existence that was almost eternal….

But my worry was not necessary. I am in no danger of indefinite existence. I went to sleep despondent in the great green building, and when I woke I was in this place. How Hymorell can have done it I don’t altogether understand. I guess he was equally tired of the game we’d been playing. I think he must have constructed a transference instrument of the ordinary type they use in that world of his. Then he must have used it in conjunction with the other to effect a kind of triangular transference-possibly in two stages. Assuming that the other part of it worked as well as mine, Hymorell returned to his own body, and a feeble-minded patient from this institution was transferred to my chair. It succeeded in its purpose of separating me from the transfer instrument.

When I realized what had happened I wrote at once under the name I have here enquiring about Terry Molton whom I claimed as an acquaintance. I learned that he was dead. He had apparently electrocuted himself with some experimental radio apparatus. The resulting fuse had started a fire in the room, but it had been discovered and put out before it could spread further. The time of its discovery was some three hours after I had woken to find myself in this place. My position here is difficult. If I pretend to be Stephen Dallboy I am a moron committed for care; if I claim to be Terry Molton I am thought to have hallucinations. I see little chance that I shall be able to reclaim my rightful property, but I think I shall be able to show myself sufficiently normal to be released.

On balance that would not be too bad. I do at least have all the parts of a passable body now. And I reckon I ought to be able to use them profitably here in the kind of world where I do understand something of what’s going on. So I gain more than I lose.

Nevertheless, I am Terry Molton.

… It is, as you will realize, a well-integrated hallucination, but if there is nothing more serious we shall undoubtedly release the patient experimentally in due course. However, we do feel that we should acquaint you with one or two discrepant points. One is that, although the two men appear never to have met, Stephen Dallboy is informed in remarkably intimate detail of Terence Molton’s affairs. Another is that when confronted for test purposes with two friends of Molton s he immediately addressed them by name and seemed to know all about them-to their great astonishment, for they protest that in no way whatever-save, perhaps, in manner of speech -does he in the least resemble Terence Molton.

You will find herewith full legal proof that the patient is indeed Stephen Dallboy. Should there be any further developments we will keep you advised.

Yours truly,

Jesse K. Johnson

(Medical Director)