 Which word doesn't describe the people of this futuristic city?
There is one fact no sane man can quarrel with ... But some men aren't sane; thus it isn't always so! I'm not your father's ghost, even if I do look a bit like him. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always have ... or do ... or will. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two of the same people. Yes, it'll be pretty obvious it must be a time machine. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you, and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man who put atomic power in every home. You can see a sort of foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that prevents passage through time from affecting us. You start to say something, but by then I'm pressing a black button, and everything outside will disappear. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can guess how things are. Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time. "Maybe it's no dimension—or it might be the fifth; if you're going to skip over the so-called fourth without traveling along it, you'd need a fifth. I figured out once that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space dimensions. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier for us to imagine it. Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time, apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space. That means you either carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small increment of time from the main field. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss. Out there is neither time nor space, apparently. You feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement floor around. "This is like the things they wear in this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to pass fairly well. And it's a pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see.
 busy
 helpful  oblivious  happy  busy