The silhouetted head moved as if to dismiss the matter. "Your sudden appearance in mid-air was startling. We were fortunate that I happened to be in flight at the time."
With a whispering sound, like the rustling of heavy cloth, the figure moved out of the direct rays of the sun and settled gracefully against one of the furniture-like things. The light struck it full, and Andreson gasped and sat bolt upright.
She was winged, no doubt about that. But the bat-like impression those wings had given him seemed to have been only a product of distance. Seen in closeup, the wings were tawny and delicate, and traced with intricate veins, their ribs were close-set, the webbing like the sheerest silk. They rose from the girl's back where her shoulderblades should have been, and at rest curved around her sides and made a backdrop for her legs and feet.
Except for those gorgeous pinions, which set her off like two great Japanese fans, she might have been human, or close to it. She no more suggested the rodent than the goddess Diana would have suggested a female gorilla. The wings, something about the bony structure underlying her face, a vague otherness about her proportions—except for these minute differences she could have passed anywhere for a strikingly lovely human girl. Her clothing was brief and simple, and not weighted with ornaments, for she needed free limbs and no useless baggage for flight.
Andreson realized that he was goggling and rearranged his face as best he could. She did not seem to take his amazed inspection as anything but normal, however. "Are you a time-traveller?" she asked, tilted her head curiously. "We could think of no other explanation. Are you from our track?"
"I don't know," Andreson confessed. "My trip was accidental, and the mechanism is a mystery to me." He considered asking about the gallery, but the girl's questions had already told him it would be fruitless.
He masked his emotions in the mechanism of locating and lighting a cigarette, while the girl waited with polite patience. It was hard to forget that there was an obscure doom prophesied—or had it been merely narrated, as historical fact?—for this exquisite creature and her whole civilization, and he was determined to say nothing about it until he knew what he was talking about.
"I discovered in my time a sort of gateway to your time, and to seventeen other nearly synchronous moments, set up by a scientist unknown to me. Each of the gates seems to open upon one single specific instant. For instance: before I fell into the one which brought me here, I saw a figure I'm sure was yours. And it was motionless above the city, all the time that I was watching it."
He broke off suddenly. "Wait a minute. If this is another time—well, suppose you tell me: am I speaking your language, or do you know mine? Or are you a telepath?"