The Thing in the Stone

“I’m sorry. I am just trying to lay the background for what I came to tell you. It came on rather slowly at first and I thought that I was crazy, that I was seeing things, that there had been more brain damage than had been apparent—or that I was finally cracking up. I did a lot of walking in the hills, you see. The country is wild and rugged and beautiful—a good place to be out in. The walking made me tired and I could sleep at night. But at times the hills changed. Only a little at first. Later on they changed more and finally they became places I had never seen before, that no one had ever seen before.”

Thorne scowled. “You are trying to tell me they changed into the past.”

Daniels nodded. “Strange vegetation, funny-looking trees. In the earlier times, of course, no grass at all. Underbrush of ferns and scouring rushes. Strange animals, strange things in the sky. Saber-tooth cats and mastodons, pterosaurs and uintatheres and—”

“All at the same time?” Thorne asked, interrupting. “All mixed up?”

“Not at all. The time periods I see seem to be true time periods. Nothing out of place. I didn’t know at first—but when I was able to convince myself that I was not hallucinating I sent away for books. I studied. I’ll never be an expert, of course—never a geologist or paleontologist—but I learned enough to distinguish one period from another, to have some idea of what I was looking at.”

Thorne took his pipe out of his mouth and perched it in the ashtray. He ran a massive hand through his wild hair.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “It simply couldn’t happen. You said all this business came on rather slowly?”

“To begin with it was hazy, the past foggily imposed upon the present, then the present would slowly fade and the past came in, real and solid. But it’s different now. Once in a while there’s a bit of flickering as the present gives way to the past—but mostly it simply changes, as if at the snap of a finger. The present goes away and I’m standing in the past. The past is all around me. Nothing of the present is left.”

“But you aren’t really in the past? Physically, I mean.”

“There are times when I’m not in it at all. I stand in the present and the distant hills or the river valley changes. But ordinarily it changes all around me, although the funny thing about it is that, as you say, I’m not really in it. I can see it and it seems real enough for me to walk around in it. I can walk over to a tree and put my hand out to feel it and the tree is there, But I seem to make no impact on the past. It’s as if I were not there at all. The animals do not see me. I’ve walked up to within a few feet of dinosaurs. They can’t see me or hear or smell me. If they had I’d have been dead a dozen times. It’s as if I were walking through a three-dimensional movie. At first I worried a lot about the surface differences that might exist. I’d wake up dreaming of going into the past and being buried up to my waist in a rise of ground that since has eroded away. But it doesn’t work that way. I’m walking along in the present and then I’m walking in the past. It’s as if a door were there and I stepped through it. I told you I don’t really seem to be in the past—but I’m not in the present, either. I tried to get some proof. I took a camera with me and shot a lot of pictures. When the films were developed there was nothing on them. Not the past—but what is more important, not the present, either. If I had been hallucinating, the camera should have caught pictures of the present. But apparently there was nothing there for the camera to take. I thought maybe the camera failed or I had the wrong kind of film. So I tried several cameras and different types of film and nothing happened. I got no pictures. I tried bringing something back. I picked flowers, after there were flowers. I had no trouble picking them but when I came back to the present I was empty-handed. I tried to bring back other things as well. I thought maybe it was only live things, like flowers, that I couldn’t bring, so I tried inorganic things—like rocks—but I never was able to bring anything back.”

“How about a sketch pad?”

“I thought of that but I never used one. I’m no good at sketching—besides, I figured, what was the use? The pad would come back blank.”

“But you never tried.”

“No,” said Daniels. “I never tried. Occasionally I do make sketches after I get back to the present. Not every time but sometimes. From memory. But, as I said, I’m not very good at sketching.”

“I don’t know,” said Thorne. “I don’t really know. This all sounds incredible. But if there should be something to it—Tell me, were you ever frightened? You seem quite calm and matter-of-fact about it now, but at first you must have been frightened.”

“At first,” said Daniels, “I was petrified. Not only was I scared, physically scared—frightened for my safety, frightened that I’d fallen into a place from which I never could escape—but also afraid that I’d gone insane. And there was the loneliness.”

“What do you mean—loneliness?”