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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
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