Shadows Out of Time

With the vague transition that comes in dreams, I drifted to a far end of the cavern and saw a ship, a spaceship I supposed, bigger than an aircraft carrier, smooth, gleaming and featureless. It glided into a huge stone bay or dock. I boarded it. Looking down, I saw legs of mineral with stony hooves striding stiffly and knew they were mine, just as I knew that my clustered eyes saw all around me as those of my fellows did. I was one of these creatures.

The floor beneath me, when I willed it, became transparent, but I knew it only seemed so; that cunning optical devices in the hull transmitted all the vistas below to the floor on which I was standing. The ship rose smoothly into the sky. The energies that gripped it made no blatant displays like heat or bellowing noise. Receding below us I saw a landscape of stark igneous rock, an island of mountains and crevasses floating in a scarlet magma sea where black crust formed briefly, split and vanished again, on the crests of waves big as mountains. The floating island, large as it was, looked frail as a balsa raft in that context.

This was Earth in the time before its crust set. The time in which the rocks of Leng had formed. Our ship rose through a dreadful, raging sky and did not even quiver in the fiery clouds or winds. It ignored little inconveniences like gravity and inertia, moving through the atmosphere, then beyond it. Through the curving anterior wall, again by willing it, I saw the glowing pink-white moon I had beheld in another dream, only a quarter as far away as the moon Roy Orlanski knew. The dark areas Orlanski’s race misnamed the lunar seas were still forming. An Apollo mission that landed on it in this age — if there could be one — would meet utter destruction at once. This moon was still hot and the tidal forces of Earth worked on it constantly.

Duration altered for me then. Hanging between an Earth that still thundered with the fires of its formation, and a partly molten moon, I began to see both under a terrific acceleration of time. It was like the speeded-up films of plants in a forest battling for the light, but a million times faster. The black slag crust thickened. Lava still burst through in apocalyptic fountains and spreading fiery seas, but it cooled and darkened, the solid state increasing. Incandescent gas erupted into the atmosphere. Clouds thickened. Water eventually condensed, high in the air, began to fall, and hissed back into steam before it came close to the surface.