s own--that the Unknown can be
pierced.

When once you admit the basic idea of Time-traveling to be
plausible, what fascinating vistas are opened to the
imagination!

Space is so crowded! The room in which you are now sitting
as you read these words--just think what that Space around
you has held in the Past, and will hold in the Future! You
occupy it now, playing out your little part; but think what
has happened where you are now sitting so calmly reading!
What tumultuous, crowding events! Your room is quiet now,
but its space has rung with war-cries; the ground under you
has been drenched with blood; and further back it was lush
with primeval jungle; and in another age it was frozen
beneath a great ice-cap; and before that it blazed, molten
with fire. Back to the Beginning.

And your little Space in the Future? It will be in the heart
of a great mechanical city, perhaps. A mechanical servant
may murder his human master in the space which you now call
your room. The great revolt of the mechanisms may start in
your room....

I think that your room will some day again be shrouded under
a forest growth. The mechanical city will be neglected,
tumbled into ruins, buried beneath the silt of the passing
centuries. The sun will slowly rise--a giant dull red ball,
burning out, cooling. And the Earth will cool. Humans,
perhaps, will have passed decadence and reverted to
savagery. Perhaps the polar ice-caps will again come down,
and ice slowly cover the dying world. All nature will be
struggling and dying, with the sun a red ball turning dark
like a cooling ember.

Millions of centuries, with whatever events--who am I to
say?--but it will go on to the End. That's a long way from
the Beginning, isn't it? And yet ours is only a tiny planet
living briefly in the great cosmos of Time and Space!

A segment of Everything that ever was and ever will be
marches through the Space of your room. What an enormously
thronged little Space! There is only Time, to keep
consecutive and orderly the myriad events which in your room
are pushing and jostling one another! I say, then, "Time is
what keeps everything from happening at once." It seems a
good definition.

I do hope you like "The Exile of Time." The writing of it
ma