CHAPTER VI
FIVE THOUSAND YEARS INTO THE FUTURE
Alan did not lose consciousness. But it was a terrible sensation of falling; a soundless, clattering chaos. The room seemed going dim; glowing silver-bright, with every smallest detail sharp and clear—and then fading. There was the sense that his body was suddenly spectral, with a lightness of thistledown, whirling away in all this soundless confusion.
The sensations were momentary; the room presently was almost normal again. Alan sat still and gazed around him. A solid, white metal floor; gray-white metal walls; a metal ceiling, windows and doors, all closed. A solid room, unmoving—standing in the bottom of a tower planted solidly upon the ground. It felt like that. Almost normal. But not quite. For under his feet Alan could feel the floor vibrating. A whirring, infinitely tiny, infinitely rapid vibration. It thrilled up into his body like a gentle current; it gave him a sense of lightness, buoyancy.
Alan knew that the tower was traveling in Time. Into our Past, or our Future he could not tell which. Across the room at a table of instruments Lea and the young man sat gazing at a bank of whirring dials. They talked together in low tones; words unintelligible to Alan. Lea, glancing over, caught his gaze and smiled. He stood up; stood trembling and dizzy. At once she came and took his arm.
"Let me see the dials," he said. He knew she could not understand the words, but he gestured, and she understood and steadied him to a seat by the table.
"San," she said, and pointed to her companion.
The young man smiled, and offered his hand in the fashion of Alan's time. He was a trifle taller than Lea; similar of aspect—a gentle-looking youth, but with strongly masculine features. Blue eyes, like Lea's, brown hair, long to his neck; a robe of fabric, dark-blue, in form not unlike hers. It revealed his delicately molded limbs. A very gentle, handsome young fellow, but there was nothing girlish, nothing effeminate about him. He stood up with a quiet dignity—almost an unconscious aspect of superiority, as though he were a gracious little prince, shook hands with Alan, and sat again at his dials.
Alan surmised he was Lea's brother. Certainly they looked alike. Alan made them understand that he wanted to read the dials. Most of the dials were unintelligible, but there was one, with a slowly moving pointer, which Alan could read. It marked 1980 A.D. Into the future! Alan cursed the fact that he could not talk to his two companions. His mind leaped back to Nanette and to me. Captured by Turber. Taken—where? He did not know. But one thing was clear, Lea and this San were friendly to him. They had forced him into the tower because they knew it was the best thing for him. They were taking him now—ahead, into what we call the Future. Doubtless to their own Time-world.
Alan believed it must be far into the future—a time when English was lost and forgotten, a dead language of history. But once there, Alan thought that they would have a way of communicating with him. Their smiles were reassuring. Lea examined his head and shoulder wounds. They were no more than severe bruises.