I was out on a large balcony. The house was built on the side of a hill. A smooth path came towards it from a nearby clump of trees. This was the only sign of a road I could see anywhere. Apart from the hum of insects it was quite silent. Everywhere over the hillside, running for miles in all directions, were banks of flowers and trees. I saw an occasional glimpse of some other house. Below me in the distance lay green fields. In the very far distance the mountains rising high into the sky were snow capped.
Chapter Thirteen: Allegretto e Sempre Cantabile
My first thought was that I had awakened at last from a long nightmare, or more likely from some fever. It was in Hawaii everything had started to go wrong. At a first glance here I was back again in Hawaii. The quality of the light, the high mountains, were superficially similar. Could this strange building be some kind of isolation hospital?
The pyjamas I was wearing might also at first glance have been taken for some exotic Hawaiian garment. But the material wasn’t right, it was much too expensive in its weave and colouring. Then nobody I had ever known had conceived of a house like this, not even in the wildest dreams. Besides it couldn’t be Hawaii. Those mountains must be at least fifty miles away. The visibility was tremendous. At such a range on Hawaii I would have been looking out over the sea but there was no sign of an ocean. There had been many flowers on Hawaii but nothing to compare with this luxuriant profusion.
Step by step I went over recent events. The night at the temple was last night. I was convinced of it. Yet this was quite certainly not Greece. The style of the house, its spaciousness, the countryside, and above all those mountains, were definitely not Grecian.
Although strange and singular things had been happening, up to this point they had not happened to me personally. This was the first big jump in my own personal consciousness. Subjectively I felt quite normal, yet objectively it seemed as if I must be as nutty as a squirrel.
I decided to search the house. I saw a second curtain opening off the balcony. As it was of the same material as before I simply walked through it without experiencing any sensation except a gentle brushing against the cheek. There were further rooms, smaller but designed in much the same fashion as the big room. However in one of them there was a table. It was the only article of furniture to be seen anywhere. On it was a considerable pile of musical manuscripts. The briefest inspection showed they were the works on which I had spent the winter, in the little temple of Dionysus. At least in that respect I was not crazy. I flicked through the pages. My memory was right in every respect, all the details were in place, exactly as they should have been. At least some things were right, inexplicable as the basic facts seemed on the face of it. I went back to the large room. Sitting there on the floor was John Sinclair.
I collapsed by his side and said weakly, ‘What the hell’s going on?’
‘I thought you might be getting worried. I’ve been round twice before but you were asleep. It’s incredible you managed to get here.’
‘Incredible?’
‘You’d better tell me exactly what happened, before you woke up to find yourself here I mean.’
I started to give a general outline of my experience in Greece. John would have none of it. He demanded I should go through everything in complete detail. I came at last to the night in the temple. At the end of my description of the contest with the god, John began to laugh delightedly.
Remembering the ordeal I said, sourly, ‘You’re not the only one to find it funny. By now the whole of Athens will be laughing hysterically about it.’
‘Piqued, eh? You know it’s ironical. While I would have been quite incapable myself of putting up any sort of musical performance, I could have told you straightaway what it was you were dealing with.’
‘What the devil d’you mean?’
‘Isn’t it perfectly obvious? It was the music of the future.’
I sat digesting this as best I could. He went on, ‘Perhaps now you can realize why I was so keen to look everywhere, all over the Earth. Don’t think I didn’t want to come with you to Greece. I would have loved it, but I was convinced that the Britain of 1966 wasn’t the last moment of time to be abroad on the Earth. Remember all the different periods we saw, perhaps five thousand B.C. in the Middle East, four hundred B.C. in Greece, the eighteenth century in America, 1917 in Europe, why stop at 1966 in Britain? There had to be something more.’
‘So you went on searching?’
‘High and low. We drew a complete blank everywhere in the southern hemisphere. I can’t be entirely sure about South America because we ran into terrible weather there. You remember the Plain of Glass?’
I nodded and he went on:
‘You see that just had to be the distant future, far away in the future.’
‘Why?’
John made no immediate answer. He took a small box-like device from his pocket and pressed what seemed to be a switch. Instantly the floor became everywhere very soft, as if one had sunk into a feather bed. Because of the rises and hollows it was easy to get oneself into a comfortable position. Then he did something again to the box and the floor went quite hard again, at least hard compared to what it had been a moment before. I found myself sitting in what might have been taken for an extremely comfortable chair.
‘So that’s why they don’t need any chairs?’
‘That’s right. Would you like some food?’
Now he came to mention it, I was damned hungry. I said so.
‘Come on then. I’ll show you some other gadgets.’
He led the way to one of the subsidiary rooms. He pressed a small button. Instantly a panel slid by and what seemed to be a typewriter keyboard appeared on one of the walls.
‘What would you like?’
I said I would like fruit juice and bacon and egg.
‘I’ll do the best I can.’
John tapped the keyboard as if he was writing a message, then gave one final flourish, pressing what seemed to be a master button. About ten seconds later a kind of hatchway opened and out came a metal arm on which were two trays. On each tray was a large glass of yellow juice, which I took to be orange juice. There was also what seemed to be a slice of bread or toast covered in some reddish fluffy stuff.
‘What the hell is this?’
‘Your bacon and egg. I think I got it right.’
He dipped his finger into the froth and tasted it. Then he nodded and said, more seriously:
‘Let’s go back and talk.’
Somewhat bemused, I followed him. We took up our respective positions on the floor.
John explained: ‘You see these people don’t eat animals, so all the food is either vegetable or synthetic. There are literally hundreds of these preparations. I haven’t sampled more than a small fraction of them yet.’
I tried the orange juice. It was excellent, in fact I couldn’t recall tasting any better. Then I addressed myself to the froth. I had no complaint about that either. It wasn’t bacon and egg by any means but it fell into the right kind of savoury class. ‘Where the devil does the taste come from?’
‘Well of course it’s artificial in the sense the chemicals are produced synthetically, but they’re the right chemicals, the ones you really get in the sort of food we’re used to. Incidentally, you’ll find the calorific value is quite low. You can eat bags of this stuff without growing fat.’
And then we were back to more gadgets. John had a piece of his bread and froth left. He smeared the froth on to the carpet material and chucked the piece of bread to the far side of the room. ‘Time to get the sweeper out,’ he remarked cheerfully. ‘Better come over to the doorway.’