Martt said, "Can't we make the tests, Father? There is a frightful lot
to do and it's nearly mid-morning already."
From the table Dr. Gryce took a small rod of the milk-white metal--a
rod half a meter long and the diameter of my smallest finger. He knelt
on the floor beside the taboret, peering into the tiny doorway of the
mechanism he was about to send winging into the distant ages of our
Past. Again we were breathless.
"More light, Frannie," he said. "I can not see inside here." Frannie
illumined the tubes along the ceiling; the room was flooded with their
soft, blue-white light.
"That's better." Rod in hand he turned momentarily to me. "I'm going
to throw the Time-switch by pressing it with this rod," he explained.
"Within the vehicle--the confined space there--the current is equally
felt." He smiled gravely. "Without the rod I should lose a finger to
the Past----"
Carefully he inserted the rod into the doorway. A moment of fumbling,
then I heard a click. The little milk-white model seemed to tremble. It
glowed; from it there came a soft, infinitely small humming sound. It
glowed, melted into translucency--transparency. For an instant I had
a vague sense that a spectral wraith of it was still before me. Then
with a blink of my eyelids I realized that it was gone. The taboret was
empty. Beside it, Dr. Gryce knelt with the rod melted off midway of its
length in his hand.
I breathed again. Brett said softly, "It is gone, Frank. Gone into the
Past, relative to our consciousness of Time. Gone from our senses--yet
it is here--occupying the same Space it did before--but with a
different Time."
He passed his hand through the apparent vacancy above the taboret.
To me then came a realization of how crowded all Space must be! Of
what a tiny fraction of things existent--of events occurring--are we
conscious! That Space over the taboret--empty to me. . . . yet it held
for a mind omniscient an infinity of things strewn through the ages of
the Past and Future. What multiplicity of events--unseen by me--Time
was holding separate in that crowded Space above the taboret!
Dr. Gryce was saying, "Let us test one now by sending it into
smallness--come here, Frank."
He had risen to stand by the table, with another of the models before
him. "This bit of stone," he said. "Let us send it into that."
He laid a flat piece of black-gray, smoothly polished stone on the
table near the model. And with another rod he reached into the doorway.
Again I heard a click. He withdrew the rod. "You see, Frank."
I saw that the rod was slightly compressed along the length he
had inserted. The model was already dwindling. Soundlessly,
untremblingly--it was contracting, becoming smaller, with shape and
aspect otherwise unchanged. Soon it was the size of my fist. Dr. Gryce
picked it up, rested it upon his opened hand. But in a moment it was no
more than a tiny cube rocking in the movement of his palm. He gripped
it gingerly with thumb and forefinger and set it on the polished black
slab of stone. Its milk-white color there showed it clearly. But it
was very small--smaller than the thumb-nail of my little finger. The
cone-shaped tower was a needle-point.
A breathless moment passed. It was now no more than a white speck upon
the black stone surface.