are going brown as it is!"

He clapped his hand on his thigh and stood hesitating on the verge.
"Gibberne," I cried, coming up, "put it down. This heat is too much!
It's our running so! Two or three miles a second! Friction of the air!"

"What?" he said, glancing at the dog.

"Friction of the air," I shouted. "Friction of the air. Going too fast.
Like meteorites and things. Too hot. And, Gibberne! Gibberne! I'm all
over pricking and a sort of perspiration. You can see people stirring
slightly. I believe the stuff's working off! Put that dog down."

"Eh?" he said.

"It's working off," I repeated. "We're too hot and the stuff's working
off! I'm wet through."

He stared at me. Then at the band, the wheezy rattle of whose
performance was certainly going faster. Then with a tremendous sweep
of the arm he hurled the dog away from him and it went spinning upward,
still inanimate, and hung at last over the grouped parasols of a knot of
chattering people. Gibberne was gripping my elbow. "By Jove!" he cried.
"I believe--it is! A sort of hot pricking and--yes. That man's moving
his pocket-handkerchief! Perceptibly. We must get out of this sharp."

But we could not get out of it sharply enough. Luckily, perhaps! For we
might have run, and if we had run we should, I believe, have burst into
flames. Almost certainly we should have burst into flames! You know we
had neither of us thought of that.... But before we could even begin to
run the action of the drug had ceased. It was the business of a minute
fraction of a second. The effect of the New Accelerator passed like
the drawing of a curtain, vanished in the movement of a hand. I heard
Gibberne's voice in infinite alarm. "Sit down," he said, and flop, down
upon the turf at the edge of the Leas I sat--scorching as I sat. There
is a patch of burnt grass there still where I sat down. The whole
stagnation seemed to wake up as I did so, the disarticulated vibration
of the band rushed together into a blast of music, the promenaders
put their feet down and walked their ways, the papers and flags began
flapping, smiles passed into words, the winker finished his wink and
went on his way complacently, and all the seated people moved and spoke.

The whole world had come alive again, was going as fast as we were, or
rather we were going no faster than the rest of the world. It was like
slowing down as one comes into a railway station. Everything seemed
to spin round for a second or two,