"We are looking through the Ice Stone." Rog Tanlu's voice was all but snatched away by that glacial blast swishing in our faces. "I set it up like a door—a door leading from my laboratory to the outside. The light you see, and the wind, has taken half a million years to get through."
Doc Champ was tugging at the collar of his coat, and my own teeth were chattering. Rog Tanlu motioned us to one side, out of that freezing blast.
"You see what we were up against?" he smiled. "Our space explorations had killed the hope that some other planet in the system might offer a suitable refuge where humans could live under anything like natural conditions.
"Moreover, there were social troubles. Politicians, philosophers and sociologists all combined to control science. A scientist had to get a special permit before he could conduct any new line of inquiry.
"So I built this laboratory—ten miles from the vitro-domed city of Iralnard—partly to escape governmental interference and partly to keep from being spied upon by Darlu Marc, another experimentalist and personal enemy of mine. I worked here alone, except for one laboratory assistant—Eyoaoc Eiioiei, as I called him. And here we created the Ice Stone.
"As I have already explained, it is no material thing—merely a cube of specialized space, foreshortened, warped and curved to attain a specific result. Its action is very simple. It slows up a beam of light exactly as does a lens, but to an incomparably greater degree. And being composed of nothing tangible, it acts on any moving thing—particle, atom or electron—exactly as it does on light photons.
"Thus a man can walk through the Ice Stone without sensing any change. Yet every function of his being is retarded, including mental processes. And when he emerges from the other side, approximately half a million years have elapsed. But once having touched it, say with his hand, he must not try to withdraw, for his hand will then be within a separate and distinct macrocosm, uninfluenced by anything outside, and he must follow on through.
"My intentions were, of course, to provide an avenue of escape from the Ice Age we were entering, for I knew it wouldn't last indefinitely. But I needed some sort of proof as to what conditions would be like in half a million years before I could offer the Ice Stone as a possible refuge. With Eyoaoc Eiioiei's help I managed to obtain several chemically depicted approximations of the nearby landscape as it would be likely to appear after the Ice Age.
"These were very beautiful—or thus they seem to me—for you must remember that in my time no one had ever seen trees or grass or flowers growing naturally in the open.
"We had just completed all this when, as we were working one day here in the laboratory, my assistant sensed a snooper-ray on us. I myself am not sensitive to an audio-visiscope emanation—sometimes called the 'snooper-ray'—but Eyoaoc Eiioiei sensed it, and he warned me.