Abruptly there was nothingness, black, impenetrable. Abruptly there was change. Abruptly I stood at the far end of a concrete sidewalk which led across a clearing of beautiful, exquisitely green grass, closely mowed. Afar to right and left dense forest formed an amphitheater for the building at the end of the sidewalk opposite me, and perhaps a hundred yards away.

At first I thought it was the Lab, but only for the briefest seconds. Doctor A's voice had somehow followed me into this great transition, for it said:

"Go ahead, Mr. Hale, hesitate not anywhere. Remember! Be sure to remember. I command you to remember!"

"My name is not Hale," I told him, as I stared at the building at the far end of the strip of sidewalk, the only strip of sidewalk on that lawn of green. "I am Father Wulstan."

Now, just how did it happen that I called myself Father Wulstan? I hadn't the slightest idea then, but only that I was Father Wulstan. But who Father Wulstan was I hadn't the slightest idea. I could not see his habit upon myself, because I still wore the nightshirt.

The shape of the building yonder was most unusual and strange. But it was familiar, fearfully familiar. It was shaped like a huge human head. The skull was bald, glistening in the sun with great brilliance, as if the sun itself nestled on the cranium.

But why the familiarity, when I could never have seen this building, or any like it, in all of my life? I asked myself these questions as I strode swiftly toward the "mouth," the front of the building. After all, how did I know I'd never before seen such a building, when I could not remember my yesterdays?

Swiftly I strode along the path, toward the strange Building of the Skull.

I was close enough that the facade of the strange building was beginning to lose its details, to become a smoothly rounded front, when I understood why the Building of the Skull looked so familiar.

The building's facade was my own face!

The skull was my skull, vastly magnified!

Whoever had erected this weird building had most certainly used my skull, or the skull of a twin of mine, as his model!

I had scarcely absorbed this utterly fantastic thought than I realized something else, something that I could not have seen until I lost the outer, apparent detail of the Building of the Skull, by coming close enough to see smaller, more intimate details. Then I made my second, most amazing discovery. The Building of the Skull was walled, roofed and domed, by an infinite mosaic of tiny hexagonal doors! They were doors of a strange shining metal which something inside told me was far more precious than gold.

There was a tiny lock in each door, in each lock a tiny key, and the voice of Doctor A, calm, sure, unexcited, came again to direct me.

"Choose the proper key, Father Wulstan. You know which one it is!"

My hand went unerringly to one of the tiny gray keys in one of the tiny gray doors. My thumb and forefinger turned the key without difficulty, as if the key and the lock were forever freshly oiled. It made no sound.

As the little door opened, there was the sensation of speed, but not of crossing a threshold. Memory came rushing back, so swiftly that I, Father Wulstan, did not even know that I had forgotten anything. The place was the crypt of Saint Dennis, far under the church, deep in the bowels of the earth. The country was England. The time was midnight or thereabouts. The day was Thursday. The year was 792 A.D. Nothing in the mind of Father Wulstan, at this time, considered the year 1947, because it had not yet come.

There were three other priests with me, all older than I. They were very old. I was thirty. I was devout, God loving, almost a religious fanatic. But I loved mankind, too, wished to do for him all that the Master had intended. I was the keeper of the faith, the doer of works. The others were Fathers Dennis, Paul and Elihu.

In both my hands I held an intricate model of dried clay. It was a model of something I had seen many times in dreams. It was a conveyance, a conveyance like none known hitherto in the history of the world, in any history I had ever read or heard of. It certainly was not mentioned in Holy Writ, unless that certain passage in the Revelation of Saint John the Divine were this—wherein he spoke of "flying things out of The Pit."

This conveyance, I realized, complete in every detail save the power by which it might travel, was intended to travel in the air, at any height, like a bird—like the fastest bird known to nature. I had shaped this thing with my loving hands. Its details had come to me in a series of dreams. It had wings of an especially beautiful design. I had burnished the gray of the clay so that it shone, for I had visioned the sun gleaming on those wings.

I had seen this "metal bird" in dreams.

Below the wings was the body of my artificial "bird," and under that body were two wheels. The wheels flared slightly outward, and were joined to the body by straight staves—and herein was I thrice puzzled. In my dream the outer rims of the wheels had been soft, pliable, so that on the ground the "bird" traveled without bouncing. I knew that the staves were of metal, but while I had seen it often in dreams, I had never seen its name.

I felt sure that man had not yet found the metal needed for the wings of my "metal bird." There was something else about it: there were three vents, carefully spaced, under each of the two wings. What traveled through those vents I did not know. I had a "metal bird" which I knew would fly, because I had constructed it again, several times, in wood and paper. Alone in the woods about Saint Dennis, I had flung the model into the air, and it had flown. I had then destroyed my models of wood and paste and paper. I did not know why.

But one thing I did know: if my metal bird did not yet possess the will to fly, if it were as man had been before God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living soul, then the world was not ready for my metal bird. Yet, if the world were not ready, why had I, a priest of God, dreamed of the metal bird, and finally, made of it a thing of clay only because proper metals, proper gums for the wheels, and proper motive power, were not yet available? I was a true priest, religiously descended from Peter the Rock, against which, as the foundation of the Church, "all Hell might not prevail."

"It is the work of the devil!" said Father Dennis, who had taken the name of this church for which all of us labored. "It should be destroyed."

I studied the face of the saintly old priest, who had done so much for humanity in the sixty-odd years of his priesthood. The face was familiar, for I had known him all the days of my own ministry.

"It is not the work of the devil, Father," I said softly. "It is the work of man, of myself, Father Wulstan of Saint Dennis. I based it on a dream, as did Saint John the Divine, who also saw winged chariots on Patmos."

"You, my son," Father Dennis pointed out, "are not Saint John the Divine, for all your piety. I say the thing should be destroyed."

"But it has been agreed, since I told you of this model, and showed it to you three as the oldest and wisest of all the brethren of Saint Dennis, that we should not give it to science, but should hide it away secretly, here in the crypt of Saint Dennis. Then, what becomes of it in course of time, is in the Hands of God. Who sent me the dream!"

I disliked even that much concession, but they were wise in religion, and I would not stand against them. My greatest desire was not to hide the trim, sleek model away, but to give it to science and beg of science to find the motive power and the missing metals. I would then pray that the Father work closely with science—provided the world was ready for what this dream might give it.

However, here was the climax. I was, besides being a priest, like many another priest, I did things that were not of the ministry. I invented things, dreamed of things that would make earthly life easier for my people. Some priests invented rare wines. Some copied the sacred books in colored inks, spending all their lives to attain written perfection. Some priests studied the stars and came by rare secrets, some of which the church called heresy, some of whom died because of their heresy. I did not believe that was heresy, or that the priests should have died. For myself I believed in earthly as well as spiritual progress.

For that reason I invented things for busy women, for laboring men, for growing children. I invented blocks with letters on them, that could be piled together. Countless other things I brought into the waking state out of my dreams, and made them real. Countless things I assembled while I was awake, between times of busy, devout ministering in my church, the ancient, venerable Saint Dennis.

To bury this model made me feel guilty. Yet my belief in the future of man was such that I knew somewhere up there ahead, generations perhaps, the missing elements of my dream for this model, would be "discovered." That was the reason I agreed to hide the model "metal bird." How and when, if ever, would it be found? Without faith I could not have endured the emptiness of the obvious answer—that eventually, in course of time, Saint Dennis would crumble into ruins, raining those ruins down upon the crypt, burying it for all time from the sight of men, losing to men the thing I had brought into being from my dream inspired.

Other things I had shaped, invented, had come into human use, had bettered the living of mankind. Why should this "metal bird" be an exception?

So, we made a niche for the metal bird in solid rock, a niche which was itself a kind of chapel, just big enough to take the spread wings of the metal bird. I looked at the six vents under the clay wings, and the wheels and staves from which essential elements were missing, and wondered if ever inventive man, in all his generations, had ever left so much to faith in God, and man's future?

We blocked the small "chapel" with a rectangle of stone, and cemented it tightly. I marked the Cross and date upon it in red paint, and blessed myself and my fellow priests before we left the crypt. I was sick at heart, but knew we had done rightly. Two of the three priests had agreed with me that at the very least it could do no harm to preserve the clay model of the metal bird.

As we left the crypt, the flames of guttering candles highlighted the faces of Dennis, Paul and Elihu. They were, as I have said, saintly faces. There was also, I felt, a coldness, a hardness in them, that reminded me of something—something far past, a memory so far back it eluded me entirely. The bodies, the faces, the vestments, were those of the church. The eyes were the eyes of those who sought truth otherwheres than in the church, the eyes of scientists.

I felt the urge to make sketches of their faces. I often did this, and they enjoyed posing.

"I'd like, Father Dennis, Father Paul, Father Elihu," I said, "to make sketches of each of you and the three of you together. I wish I had thought in time. I would have made the sketch and left it behind the rectangle of stone, with my metal bird of dreams."

Father Dennis crossed himself.

"I am glad my likeness does not repose anywhere with this devil's work we have imprisoned behind the red cross! But," and he smiled, "I do not mind another sketch. You have something new in each sketch you make of me!"

So they posed, and I made a sketch of each of them, and of the three together. Then Father Paul brought me a reflecting glass—of a special design I had created for our use in the church of Saint Dennis—and I looked at myself in it, and sketched myself among these three brethren of the church of Saint Dennis. Then I made an end for a little time.