intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his
memories were as vivid as yesterday.

Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad,
low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments
and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge
beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent.
Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones,
some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton
of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that
was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its
shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic.

All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince--a sudden,
nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong!

The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his
weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did
that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he
caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting
posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast,
un-Earthly metropolis.

"Take it easy, Ned Vince...."

The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old,
familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill,
parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the
voice--located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that
box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small,
brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered
paws--hands they were, really--were touching rows of keys.

To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent,
looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high
order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were
more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a
place as eerie as this.

Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid
of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that
in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was
recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make
the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy,
whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty
speaking English words, anyway