The Adventure of Wyndham Smith

Hunted by a man-made monster, they fled into an empty world, two last survivors who dared to gamble for the dawn of a new forbidden day. . . . an excerpt from: CHAPTER ONE Wyndham Smith was at Guy's Hospital at the time he had his experience, a medical student in his second year. He looked round a room floored and walled and furnished in the same substance, which was strange to him - "ebonied glass" came to his mind - and across at a man who was strangely dresses - Oriental? - no, not exactly that - and with an aspect of age with in the grave dignity of his face, and of youth in the smooth freshness of his skin, who was saying in a distant and yet not unfriendly way: "I suppose you are puzzled as to where you have come?" "Once before," he replied, "I had a dream something like this. I mean I knew I was dreaming the while I dreamed. I remember hoping I should not wake till the end came; but this is the most vivid dream that I even had." The mans lips moved to a slight smile. "You need have no fear about that." "No? I feel as though I were awake now." "So you are." Wyndham Smith looked round. He considered the polished shadows of the walls, and the brighter opaqueness of the ceiling which gave a diffused light to the room. He was not convinced. "Then, perhaps," he said, "You will explain how I got here." It was a reasonable request, though he saw that a dream might invent an answer of no reliable value. "That," the protagonist of his dream replied, "is what I propose to do. It is a courtesy which I might have extended freely to a young man of your profession, but it is necessary apart from that. It is important here from the early part of the twentieth century. You are now - by an extension of your system of reckoning - in the later part of the forty-fifth." "You can't expect me to swallow that." "No? I wonder why. Has the idea of such transmigration, either voluntary or enforced, never entered your mind? Even so, you have had some years of training which should make you receptive to new ideas. I thought that yours was a time when the implications of relativity began to be understood." "I am afraid," Wyndham Smith said honestly, "that I am one of those to whom the implications of relativity are not clear. I am willing to believe that time is the fourth dimension which has a plausible sound. But I don't go far beyond that. . . As to people being able to jump about in time, from one age to another, even if it were shown in theory that they could - which would be hard to believe - observation tells us definitely that it doesn't occur. "May I ask how you have been able to observe that?"