e shifting, crawling,
slowly tossing and rolling. It was a formless vista of Nothingness,
yet it seemed a pregnant Nothingness. Things I could sense were
happening out there; things almost to be seen.

Then my sight, my perception, gradually became adjusted. The gray mist
remained, and slowly it took form. It made a tremendous panorama of
gray, a void of illimitable, unfathomable distance; gray above,
below--everywhere; and in it the cage hung poised.

The Robot said, "Is it clearing? Are you seeing anything?"

"Yes," I murmured. I held Mary firmly beside me; there was the sense,
in all this weightless void, that we must fall. "Yes, but it is gray;
only gray."

"There are colors," said the Robot. "And the daylight and darkness of
the days. But we are moving through them very rapidly, so they blend
into gray."

The Time-dials of the cage controls showed their pointers whirling in
a blur. We were speeding forward through the years--a thousand years
to a second of my consciousness; or a hundred thousand years to a
second: I could not say.[2] All the colors, the light and shade of
this great changing void, were mingled to this drab monochrome.

[Footnote 2: Upon a later calculation I judged that the average
passage of the years in relation to my perception of Time-rate was
slightly over 277,500 years a second. Undoubtedly throughout the
myriad centuries preceding the birth of mankind our rate was very
considerably faster than that; and from the dawn of history
forward--which is so tiny a fraction of the whole--we traveled
materially slower.]

The movement was a flow. The changes of possibly a hundred thousand
years occurred while I blinked my eyes. It seemed a melting movement.
Shapes were melting, dissipating, vanishing; others, intermingled,
rising to form a new vista. There were a myriad details, each of them
so rapid they were lost to my senses; but the effect of them, over the
broad sweeps of longer Time, I could perceive.

A void of swirling shapes. The Beginning! But not the Beginning of
Time. This that I was seeing was near the beginning of our world. This
was the new Earth here, forming now. Our world--a new star amid all
the others of the great Celestial Cosmos. As I gazed at its changing
sweep of movement, my whirling fancy filled in some of the details
flashing here unseen.

* * * * *

A few moments ago this had been a billion and a half years before my
birth. 1,500,0