unfamiliar.
'I can't understand you,' Gordon said helplessly.
The other pointed to himself and spoke again. 'Vel Quen,' he said.
Vel Quen? Gordon remembered now. Zarth Arn had said that was the name of his scientific colleague in the future.
The future? Then the two scientists
With sudden wild excitement, Gordon tried to sit up. He couldn't do it. He was still too weak, and slipped back.
But he had got a glimpse of his own body as he sat up, and the sight had stunned him.
It wasn't his body. It was not John Gordon's stocky, muscular figure. This was a taller, slimmer body he now inhabited, one dressed in silky white sleeveless shirt and trousers, and sandals.
'Zarth Arn's body!' husked Gordon. 'And back in my own time, Zarth Arn is awaking in mine!'
Old Vel Quen apparently recognized the name he spoke. The old scientist nodded quickly.
'Zarth Arn-John Gordon,' he said, pointing at him.
The exchange had worked! He had crossed two thousand centuries and was now in another man's body!
It didn't feel any different. Gordon tried moving his hands and feet. Every muscle responded perfectly. Yet his hair still bristled from the ghastly strangeness of it. He had an hysterical nostalgia for his own body.
Vel Quen seemed to understand his feelings. The old man patted his shoulder reassuringly, then offered him a crystal beaker filled with foaming red liquid. Gordon drank it, and began to feel stronger.
The old scientist helped him get up from the table, and steadied him as he stood looking wonderingly around the room.
Brilliant sunlight poured through tall windows that filled all eight sides of the octagonal chamber. The light flashed and glittered off machines and instruments and racks of queer metal spools. Gordon was no scientist, and all this science of the future baffled him.
Vel Quen led him toward a corner in which there was a tall mirror. He stood transfixed the moment he caught a glimpse of himself in the glass.
'So this is what I look like now!' Gordon whispered, staring wildly at his own image.
His figure was now that of a tall, black-haired young man of well over six feet. The face was dark, aquiline and rather handsome, with serious dark eyes. It was altogether different from John Gordon's own square, tanned face.
He saw that he was wearing snug-fitting shirt and trousers. Vel Quen threw a long, silky white cloak around his shoulders. The old scientist himself was similarly attired.
He gestured to Gordon that he must rest. But weak as Gordon felt, he couldn't without first looking out at this unknown world of the far future.
He stumbled to one of the windows. He expected to look forth on wondrous vistas of super-modern cities, marvelous metropoli of the star-conquering civilization. But Gordon was disappointed.
Before him lay a scene of wild, forbidding natural grandeur. This octagonal chamber was the upper floor of a massive little cement tower which was perched on a small plateau at the edge of a sheer precipice.
Stupendous mountain peaks crowned with glittering white snow rose in the bright sunlight. From them and from the tower, dark and awesome defiles dropped for thousands of feet. There was not another building in sight. It looked much like the Himalayas of his own time.
Weakness made John Gordon sway dizzily. Vel Quen hastily led him out of the tower-room and down to a small bedroom on the floor below. He stretched on a soft couch and was almost instantly asleep.
When Gordon awoke, it was another day. Vel Quen came in and greeted him, then checked his pulse and respiration. The old scientist smiled reassuringly, and brought him some food.
There was a thick, sweet, chocolate-colored drink, some fruit, some wafers like dry biscuits. It was all evidently charged with nutritional elements, for Gordon's hunger vanished after the slight meal.
Then Vel Quen began to teach him his language. The old man used a box-like little apparatus which produced realistic stereoscopic images, carefully naming each object or scene he exhibited.
Gordon spent a week in his task, not going outside the tower. He picked up the language with astonishing quickness, partly because of Vel Quen's scientific teaching and partly because it was based on his own English. Two thousand centuries had greatly enlarged and changed its vocabulary, but it was not like a completely alien tongue.
At the end of that week Gordon's strength had fully returned, and by that time he was able to speak the language fluently.
'We are on the planet Earth?' was the first eager question he had put to Vel Quen.
The old scientist nodded. 'Yes, this tower is located amid the highest mountains of Earth.'
So it was the Himalayas whose snowy peaks rose around the tower, as Gordon had guessed. They looked as wild and lonely and grand as when he had flown over them in war days long ago.
'But aren't there any cities or people left on Earth?' he cried.
'Certainly there are. Zarth Arn chose this lonely spot on the planet simply so that his secret experiments would not be disturbed.
'From this tower, he has been exploring the past by going back into the bodies of many men in various epochs of human history. Yours is the remotest period of the past that Zarth Arn has yet tried to explore.'
It was a little overwhelming to John Gordon to realize that other men had found themselves in his own uncanny present position.
'Those others-they were able to return without trouble to their own bodies and times?'
'Of course-I was here to operate the mind-transmitter, and when the time came I effected the re-exchange just as I will do with you later.'
That was reassuring. Gordon was still wildly excited by this unprecedented adventure into a future age, but he hated to think that he might be marooned indefinitely in a stranger's body.
Vel Quen explained to Gordon in detail the amazing scientific method of contacting and exchanging minds across time.
He showed him the operation of the telepathic amplifier that could beam its thought-message back to any selected mind in the past. And then he outlined the operation of the mind-exchange apparatus itself.
'The mind is an electric pattern in the neurons of the brain. The forces of this apparatus detach that pattern and embody it in a network of 'nonmaterial photons.'
'That photon-mind can then be projected along any dimension. And since time is the fourth dimension of matter, the photon-mind can be hurled into past time. The forces operate in a two-way channel, simultaneously detaching and projecting both minds so as to exchange them.'
'Did Zarth Arn himself invent this method of exchanging minds?' Gordon asked wonderingly.
'We invented it together,' Vel Quen said. 'I had already perfected the principle. Zarth Arn, my most devoted scientific pupil, wanted to try it out and he helped me build and test the apparatus.
'It has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. You see those racks of thought-spools[1]? In them is the vast mass of information brought back by Zarth Arn from past ages he has explored thus. We've worked secretly because Arn Abbas would forbid his son to take the risk if he knew.'
'Arn Abbas?' repeated Gordon questioningly. 'Who is he, Vel Quen?'
'Arn Abbas is sovereign of the Mid-Galactic Empire, ruling from its capital world at the sun Canopus. He has two sons. The oldest is his heir, Jhal Arn. The second son is Zarth Arn.'
Gordon was astounded. 'You mean that Zarth Arn, the man whose body I now inhabit, is son of the greatest ruler in the galaxy?'
The old scientist nodded. 'Yes, but Zarth is not interested in power or rule. He is a scientist and scholar, and that is why he leaves the court at Throon to carry on his exploration of the past from this lonely tower on Earth.'
Gordon remembered now that Zarth Arn had said he was high in the Empire. But he had had no suspicion of his true exalted position.
'Vel Quen, what exactly is the Mid-Galactic Empire? Does it take in all the galaxy?'
