You didn’t breathe on a timeless world. You merely—somehow—existed.
“It’s opening!” Margot cried.
The black rectangle, ominously coffin-shaped, was indeed opening.
“The matter transmitter,” Margot said a second time. “The secret of proto-man, of our ancestors who colonized all the worlds of space with it, instantly, at the same cosmic moment. Think of what it means, Ramsey, can you? Instantaneous travel, anywhere, without the need for energy since energy cannot be used here, without the passage of time since time does not exist here.” She stood transfixed, looking at the black box. The lid had lifted at right angles to the rest of the box.
Margot said, in the whisper of an awed thought: “Who controls it controls the galaxy….”
And she walked toward the box.
At that moment Ramsey had a vision. He saw—or thought he saw—Margot Dennison in the costume she had worn when they first met. She stood, eyes wide, fearful, expectant, before a chess-board. The pieces seemed to be spaceships. It was a perfectly clear vision, but it was the only such vision Ramsey had ever been vouchsafed in his life. He was no mystic. He did not know what to make of it.
Playing chess with Margot was—proto-man.
Ramsey only saw his hand.
A hand perhaps five million years old.