d on, leaving him forever.

His thoughts winged ahead. He touched Tina as they stood together at
the window gazing out at the shadowy New York City. It was now 1940.

"Tina," he said, "if our friends are safe in your world--"

"If only they are, Larry!"

"And if your people there are in trouble, in danger--you will let me
help?"

She turned abruptly to regard him, and he saw a mist of tenderness in
the dark pools of her eyes.

"In history, Larry, I have often been interested in reading of a
strange custom outgrown by us and supposed to be meaningless. Yet
maybe it is not. I mean--"

She was suddenly breathless. "I mean even a Princess, as they call me,
likes to--to be human. I want to--I mean I've often wondered--and
you're so dear--I want to try it. Was it like this? Show me."

She reached up, put her arms about his neck and kissed him!

CHAPTER XV

_A Thousand Years into the Future_

1930 to 2930--a thousand years in three hours. It was sufficiently
slow traveling so that Larry could see from the cage window the actual
detailed flow of movement: the changing outline of material objects
around him. There had been the open country of Revolutionary times
when this space was north of the city. It was a grey, ghostly
landscape of trees and the road and the shadowy outlines of the Atwood
house five hundred feet away.

Larry saw the road widen. The fence suddenly was gone. The trees were
suddenly gone. The shapes of houses were constantly appearing; then
melting down again, with others constantly rearing up to take their
places; and always there were more houses, and larger, more enduring
ones. And then the Atwood house suddenly melted: a second or two, and
all evidence of it and the trees about it were gone.

There was no road; it was a city street now; and it had widened so
that the cage was poised near the middle of it. And presently the
houses were set solid along its borders.

At 1910 Larry began to recognize the contour of the buildings: The
antiquated Patton Place. But the flowing changing outlines adjusted
themselves constantly to a more familiar form. The new apartment
house, down the block in which Larry and I lived, rose and assembled
itself like a materializing spectre. A wink or two of Larry's eyelids
and it was there. He recalled the months of its construction.

The cage, with Larry as a passenger, could not have stopped in these
years: he realized it, now. There was a nameless feeling, a r