In spite of his intense self-absorption, Caxton stared at her. He had run across the peculiar logic of fuzzy-minded people before, but it always shocked him when facts were so brazenly ignored in order that a crackpot theory might hold water. He said, ‘I don’t see where the profit comes in. What about the dollar you got back for each item that was stolen?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the woman. Her face lengthened. Then she looked startled. And then, as she grasped how completely her pet idea had been wrecked, an angry flush suffused her wind-and suntanned face. ‘Some publicity scheme, maybe!’ she snapped.

  It struck Caxton that it was time to terminate the interview. He said hastily, ‘Do you know anyone going into Inchney tonight? I’d like to get a ride if I could.’

  The change of subject did its work. The high color faded from the woman’s cheeks. She said thoughtfully:

  ‘Nope, no one I know of. But don’t worry. Just get on the highway, and you’ll get a lift.’

  The second car picked him up.

  VII

  He sat in the hotel as darkness fell thinking of the girl and her father with a carload of the finest manufactured goods in the world. She sells them as souvenirs, one to a person. He buys old metal. And then, as added insanity, an old man goes around buying up the sold goods - he thought of Kellie’s print - or destroying them. Finally, there was the curious amnesia of a photo-supply salesman named Caxton, who had started out looking for the origin of a certain projector.

  Somewhere behind Caxton, a man’s voice cried out in anguish, ‘Oh, look what you’ve done now. You’ve torn it.’

  A quiet, mature, resonant voice answered, ‘I beg your pardon. You paid a dollar for it, you say? I shall pay for the loss, naturally. Here - and you have my regrets.’

  In the silence that followed, Caxton stood up and turned. He saw a tall, splendid looking man with gray hair, in the act of rising from beside a younger man who was staring at the pieces of a photoprint in his fingers. The old man headed for the revolving door leading to the street, but it was Caxton who got there first, Caxton who said quietly but curtly, ‘One minute, please. I want an explanation of what happened to me after I got into the trailer of the girl Selanie and her father. And I think you’re the man who can give it to me.’

  He stopped. He was staring into eyes that were like pools of gray fire, eyes that literally seemed to tear into his face, and to peer with undiminished intensity at the inside of his brain. Caxton had time for a brief, startled memory of what Kellie had said about the way this man had outfaced them on the train with one deadly look, and then it was too late for further thought. With a tigerish speed, the other stepped forward and caught Caxton’s wrist. There was a feel of metal in that touch, metal that sent a tingling glow along Caxton’s arm, as the big man said in a low, compelling voice, ‘This way - to my car.’

  Caxton barely remembered getting into a long, gleaming, hooded car. The rest was darkness - mental… physical….

  He was lying on his back on a hard floor. Caxton opened his eyes and for a blank moment stared at a domed ceiling two hundred feet above him. The ceiling was at least three hundred feet wide, and nearly a quarter of it was window, through which a gray-white mist of light showed, as if an invisible sun were trying hard to penetrate a thin but persistent fog.

  The wide strip of window ran along the center of the ceiling straight on into the distance. Into the distance! With a gasp, Caxton jerked erect. For a moment then his mind wouldn’t accept what his eyes saw.

  There was no end to that corridor. It stretched in either direction until it became a blur of gray marble and gray light. There was a balcony and a gallery and a second gallery; each floor had its own side corridor, set off by a railing. And there were countless shining doors and, every little while, a branch corridor, each suggesting other vast reaches of that visibly monstrous building.

  Very slowly, the first enormous shock over, Caxton climbed to his feet. Memory of the old man - and what had gone before - was a weight in his mind. He thought darkly: He got me into his car, and drove me here.

  But why was he here? On all the wide surface of the Earth, no such building existed.

  A chill went up his spine. It cost him a distinct effort to walk toward the nearest of the long line of tall, carved doors and pull it open. What he expected, he couldn’t have told. But his first reaction was disappointment. It was an office, a large room with plain walls. There were some fine-looking cabinets along one wall. A great desk occupied the corner facing the door. Some chairs, and two comfortable-looking settees and another, more ornate door completed the picture. No one was in the room. The desk looked spick and span, dustless. And lifeless.

  The other door proved to be locked, or else the catch was too complicated for him to operate.

  Out in the corridor again, Caxton grew conscious of the intense silence. His shoes clicked with an empty sound. And door after door yielded the same office-furnished but uninhabited interior.

  Half an hour passed, by his watch. And then another half hour. And then he saw the door in the distance. At first it was only a brightness. It took on glittering contours, became an enormous glass affair set in a framework of multitinted windows. The door was easily fifty feet in height. When he peered through its transparent panes, he could see great white steps leading down into a mist that thickened after about twenty feet, so that the lower steps were not visible.

  Caxton stared uneasily. There was something wrong here. That mist, obscuring everything, persisting for hours, clinging darkly. He shook himself. Probably there was water down there at the foot of the steps, warmish water subjected to a constant stream of cold air, so thick fog formed. He pictured that in his mind; a building ten miles long standing beside a lake, and buried forever in gray mists.

  Get out of here! Caxton thought sharply.

  The latch on the door was at a normal height. But it was hard to believe that he would be able to maneuver the gigantic structure with such a comparatively tiny leverage. It opened lightly, gently, like a superbly balanced machine. Caxton stepped out into the pressing fog and began, swiftly at first, and then with developing caution, to go down the steps. No use landing up in a pool of deep water. The hundredth step was the last; and there was no water. There was nothing except mists, no foundation for the steps, no ground.

  On hands and knees, dizzy with a sudden vertigo, Caxton turned around and started crawling up the steps. He was swaying so dizzily inside, like an untrained man who has suddenly been swung out over a cliff clinging to a rope, that he only caught a glimpse of the room in a sort of after-vision.

  He had glanced back in his agony. It was entirely a chance movement of his head, a wobble of his body which made his neck roll loosely… and he saw the room.

  Caxton stopped. But that, also, was an unmonitored act. The image flitted through his mind like a fantasy, and if he had had any strength that is all it would have been - a fantasy. If he had any strength, he would have climbed on, and the scene would have faded as a dream fades. But he was gasping from the weakness of fear that had seized him; and he lay down full-length on that step, bracing himself there with his hands, one palm on the step below, the other on the one above.

  When he was able to look there, through a chink in the fog, was the room. It was slantingly off to one side toward the farther reaches of the steps. But it was brightly lighted, and the drifting fog had an effect like a half-drawn curtain that somebody kept trying to close, and couldn’t quite.

  Exactly how long it took until he was over by that ‘curtain’ Caxton never afterward remembered. He did not even recall his route. He must have crawled along one step to the point opposite the break in the fog, and then he must have gingerly lowered himself towards the half-open ‘curtain’.

  He presumed it was a crawling action. Because, surely, he wouldn’t have dared to stand erect.

  Besides, when he abruptly came to awareness, he was kneeling on the second step, and thinking that it was safer to operate from there.

  Caxton eased his foot over from the step to the floor. What he expected was not clear, but what happened was that he touched a solid floor.

  Even then it took a timeless period, again because he had no awareness, to decide to trust his weight to the floor.

  I’m a schoolteacher type making like a steeplejack, he was thinking wanly…Oddly, that picture of himself was calming.

  He had a realisation. The floor was holding him with the stable power of a genuine floor of a genuine room.

  What had happened? He had pushed himself away from the steps, yet he held to them while he edged his body along the glossy smooth (plastic?) floor.

  Abruptly, he stood up - and he was in the room.

  That quick. That easy. And the ridiculous part was that, as he straightened, he saw a window in the room … and a scene beyond the window … and he forgot caution.

  It was a moment of total forgetfulness. For the window was huge, and he could see what was beyond it.

  For that moment, he was lost in wonder. He ran to the window like a child; and it was only as he was standing there that he realised how completely he had abandoned the automatic good sense of his prolonged overstimulation - the kind of inner excitement that in the past he had always called temporary nervous breakdowns.

  As he stood there, realising that he had done it again, he was stunned by the deadlines of such a lapse … that if anything had gone wrong, it could have been the end for him to the exact extent of the wrongness.

  The thought-feeling faded. He had never been a man who clung to past fears. His inner world was adaptive, and not normally given to might-have-beens. He could be thrown. How he could be thrown! His reaction at Tichenor Collegiate was but a sample of a lifetime of similar strong reactions. What had always saved him from such … breakdowns … was that he seldom introspected about them after they were over.

  He didn’t now.

  There directly in front of him was the window. There was the scene outside the window. Automatically, he began to react to that.

  VIII

  He was looking out from a height at a city. Caxton caught his breath in a quick inhalation, because -

  It was the city of the novelty films from the Arlay Library. The sky was dotted with Fly-O’s. Thousands of them. But even the residential street - as he now perceived it to be - which this house overlooked, had people on the streets, just plain walking.

  Except for the Fly-O’s, he saw no vehicles during that first wondering look.

  What he could see of the city was not obviously different from the many-storied megalopolitan monsters of his own time. There seemed to be more gleam, more sunlight reflection.

  More glass? Caxton wondered. Or, perhaps, transparent plastic?

  Those fleeting observations ran their respective courses. And it was then that he had his big thought: What city? What year?

  Instantly, with that thought, he was in another of his breakdowns.

  WHAT YEAR?

  He whirled. Hs saw a door and he ran toward it. It opened to his touch, and beyond it were steps leading down to an ornate lower hallway, and to a big glass door that led outside to some outside steps. These took him down to the street.

  As he went through a vaguely observed gate out on to what looked like a plastic sidewalk, a modicum of sense returned to Caxton.

  I could get lost.

  The excitement, the abnormal nervousness, remained. But after that realisation, he was able to force himself to pause and to examine his surroundings. Here at street level he saw that the house from which he had almost catapulted himself was one of several on the highest level of a slope.

  It was immensely reassuring. Hard to lose that.

  All I want is one look at a newspaper…. The paper would have the date and the name of the city. He would snatch it up, take one look at it - and then he would rush back to the house and up to a room where a strange fog framed a passageway to some giant steps of a building through which he had come from another time.

  Caxton grew aware that to his right, about a block distant, the buildings that he could see had the shape and silhouette of being a shopping center.

  As he ran, he passed people who were dressed in brilliantly colored silken-like, loose-fitting slacks and coats. Over this, many that he saw wore matching colored Fly-O’s, strapped to their backs around the shoulders and under the armpits.

  It was the awareness of the difference in clothing between the others and himself that slowed Caxton down. He had the distinct feeling that a man in an outlandish, old-fashioned suit, should be walking.

  He came to the shopping center with that restraining thought still holding him back from an impulse to run at top speed. There were no street vehicles on this busier street, either. But there were more people, his quick glance, it seemed to him, counted several hundred.

  The scene was utterly fascinating. Every few moments, a man or woman with a Fly-O would swoop down from the sky, or take off from the sidewalk. … At first, Caxton held his breath each time. Each time the fear came that the person would fall back, or land too hard. But he presently saw that to those who were doing it, it was all so casual, and such a great number of individuals were involved, that abruptly his anxiety turned back on himself.

  Again, it was his appearance that concerned him.

  I must look strange, he thought.

  But the truth was, people merely glanced at him and that brought him back to a variation of an old conviction: it was a big world; even back in the 1970’s that had been so. Each human being had only twenty-four hours, and therefore was busy with his own purposes. The merely bizarre could not distract him.

  I could be an actor coming from a rehearsal.. . How would they know? And why would they care? Back home, passersby never gave an oddball more than a glance.

  It was the same here, and so he was free to gaze. The excitement that came then had no parallel in his previous experience. Here were the children of the children of the children of the people of his own time…My God, its terrific!

  In that keyed-up state of exhilaration, he walked an entire block. He merely glanced into store windows, and into the open doors of shops. Several times, he had a vague impulse to stop and just stare at what he saw. But he couldn’t even slow down from that rapid walk; his muscles moved him automatically forward.

  But he did notice that the shops were not too different from his own era. And that did not surprise him. Shopkeepers and their goods had been an enduring aspect of man’s world for thousands of years.

  Nonetheless, the reality of it relieved Caxton. It was a familiarness that even absorbed some of his developing dismay at the fact that he saw neither newspapers nor magazines.

  I’ll have to ask somebody, he thought, highly disturbed. What was disturbing was that he couldn’t imagine how he could present such a question.

  All he wanted was the date: the day, the month, the year.

  It seemed such a little thing. Yet Caxton had the distinctly unhappy conviction that people didn’t answer questions like that. The day, yes. Like, you could say that you didn’t know if this was the 22nd or the 23rd. But after they’d told you which, and you said, ‘Well, what month? And then when they’d give you a funny look, and told you - then you asked the big one: What year?

  How would you ever know that the reply you got wasn’t as facetious as the replier would assume your question to be.

  With a conscious effort, Caxton stopped his gyrating mind and, entirely on instant impulse, walked over to a man who was standing gazing into a shop window just ahead. To this stranger, Caxton said, ‘Excuse me, sir.’

  The man turned. He had brown eyes, and his hair was combed thick, and it was dark brown. His face skin was smooth and pink, and he was younger than Caxton, seeming to be about thirty.

  He said in perfectly plain, understandable English, ‘What’s the matter? Are you ill?’

  So I look wild… . Even as he had the realisation, Caxton parroted the thought that had so abruptly moved him to this communication, ‘I seem to have amnesia. What year is this? Where am I? What city is this?’

  The stranger gazed at him sympathetically, then he raised his arm. As he did so, part of the loose sleeve fell away from his wrist and hand, revealing a bracelet.

  ‘Where’s yours?’ the man asked.

  All in a flash, Caxton decided that the bracelet was an identification. In that same flash, he saw himself trapped by his single act of having spoken to one person.

  He spun away, and headed across the street at a dead run. Looking hastily back, moments later, he saw that the man had not moved, was still standing there at the window. But he was gazing at Caxton.

  Reassured, Caxton slowed. But after a moment he realised there was something about the other man that bothered him still: the way he was standing. He glanced back again and, though he was farther away now, there was no question. The fellow had his arm raised, and he was holding the bracelet on his wrist close to his mouth.

  His mouth was moving.

  Caxton had come to a corner. Abruptly terrified, he whipped around that corner and ran along the street that was there.

  This time, as he ran, he had a new feeling: disorientation. It was a horrifying internal sensation. Somehow, he kept refusing to accept that die streets were really solid, permanent places. It was a complete madness. The feeling came that it wasn’t he that was moving, but that the sidewalks were shifting on him. He recalled a similar experience as a boy, when, looking down at a stream from a bridge, suddenly it was the bridge that seemed to be moving.

  Now it was not just the stream or a bridge, but the whole world that was moving. He realised that part of his turmoil came from the fear that he had ventured too far. Everything looked strange. It was as if he had got turned around.