Permitting herself no sign of a reaction, she re-set the buttons. The green light returned. She repeated the preliminary code, whereupon the light grew a deeper pink and two blue lamps began to blink. She returned all functions to standby, pulled the harness from her body, rose to her feet and began to make her calculations from the beginning. Her original accuracy was confirmed. She went back to her seat, fastened her webbing, pressed the four buttons in sequence. And for the third time the machine stated its inability to carry out the basic return procedure.
"Is the time machine broken, mama?"
"Impossible."
"Then someone is preventing us from leaving."
"The least welcome but the likeliest suggestion. We were unwise not to bring protection."
"The baboons do not travel well."
"It is our misfortune. But we had not expected any life at all at the End of Time." She fingered her ear. "We shall have to rule out metaphysical interference."
"Of course." He had been brought up by the highest standards. There were some things which were not mentioned, nor, better yet, considered, by the polite society of his day. And Snuffles was an aristocrat of boys.
She consulted the chronometer. "We shall remain inside the machine and make regular attempts to return at every hour out of twenty hours. If by then we have failed, we shall consider another plan."
"You are not frightened, mama?"
"Mystified, merely."
Patiently, they settled down to let the first hour pass.
2. An Exploratory Expedition
Hand in hand and cautiously they set their feet upon a pathway neither liquid nor adamantine, but apparently of a dense, purple gas which yielded only slightly as they stepped along it, passing between forms which could have been the remains either of buildings or of beasts.
"Oh, mama!" The eyes of the boy were bright with unusual excitement. "Shall we find monsters?"
"I doubt if it is life, in any true sense, that we witness here, Snuffles. There is only a moral. A lesson for you — and for myself."
Streamers of pale red wound themselves around the whispering towers, like pennants about their poles. Gasping, he pointed, but she refused the sight more than a brief glance. "Sensation, only," she said. "The appeal to the infantile imagination is obvious — the part of every adult that should properly be suppressed and which should not be encouraged too much in children."
Blue winds blew and the buildings bent before them, crouching and changing shape, grumbling as they passed. Clusters of fragments, bloody marble, yellow-veined granite, lilac-coloured slate, frosted limestone, gathered like insects in the air; fires blazed and growled, and then where the pathway forked they saw human figures and stopped, watching.
It was an arrangement of gallants, all extravagant cloaks and jutted scabbards. It stuck legs and elbows at brave angles so the world should know its excellence and its self-contained beauty, so that the collective bow, upon the passing of a lady's carriage, should be accomplished with a precision of effect, swords raised, like so many tails, behind, heads bent low enough for doffed plumes to trail, and be soiled, upon the pavings.
Calling, she approached the group, but it had vanished, background, carriages and all, before she had taken three paces, to be replaced by exotic palms which forever linked and twisted their leaves and leaned one towards the other, as if in a love dance. She hesitated, thinking that she saw beyond the trees a plaza where stood a familiar old man, her father, but it was a statue, and then it was a pillar, then a fountain, and through the rainbow waters she saw three or four faces which she recognized, fellow children, known before her election to adult status, smiling at her, memories of an innocence she sometimes caught herself yearning for; a voice spoke, seemingly into her ear (she felt the breath, surely!): "The Armatuce shall be Renowned through you, Dafnish…" Turning, clutching her son's hand, she discovered only four stately birds walking on broad, careful feet into a shaft of light which absorbed them. Elsewhere, voices sang in strange, delicate languages, of sadness, love, joy and death. A cry of pain. The tinkling of bells and lightly brushed harp strings. A groan and deep-throated laughter.
"Dreams," said the boy. "Like dreams, mama. It is so wonderful."
"Treachery," she murmured. "We are misled." But she would not panic.
Once or twice more, in the next few moments, buildings shaped themselves into well-known scenes from her recent past. In the shifting light and the gas it was as if all that had ever existed existed again for a brief while.
She thought: "If Time has ceased to be, then Space, too, becomes extinct — is all this simply illusion — a memory of a world? Do we walk a void, in reality? We must consider that a likelihood."
She said to Snuffles: "We had best return to our ship."
A choir gave voice in the surrounding air, and the city swayed to the rhythm. A young man sang in a language she knew:
Ten times thou saw'st the fleet fly by:
The skies illum'd in shining jet
And gold, and lapis lazuli .
How clear above the engines' cry
Thy voice of sweet bewilderment!
(Remember, Nalorna, remember the Night) .
Then, wistfully, the voice of an older woman:
"Could I but know such ecstasy again ,
When all those many heroes of the air
Knel't down as one and call'd me fair ,
Then I would judge Nalorna more than bless'd!
Immortal Lords immortal, too, made me!
(I am Nalorna, whom the flying godlings loved) ."
And she paused to listen, against the nagging foreboding at the back of her brain, while an old man sang:
" Ah, Nalorna, so many that are dead loved thee!
Slain like winged game that falls beneath the hunter's shot .
First they rose up, and then with limbs outspread,
