The light-globes are big and awkward, and the light they give is harsh and glaring, but there’s no question that it’s electrical. I’ve seen Prince Ram turn the light in his cabin on and off by touching a plate in the wall.

With no effort whatsoever I could make myself believe that I’m aboard a twentieth-century vessel—a peculiar one, true, designed by someone from an obscure country who has invented the whole concept of the oceangoing ship from scratch without ever having seen one from Europe or the United States, but corresponding to them in all the important details. And yet I know that I’m back here at the tail end of the Ice Age, with woolly mammoths and shaggy rhinoceroses still wandering around where Paris and London will someday be.

Who are these Athilantans, anyway? How could they possibly have achieved all this, tens of thousands of years out of the normal human sequence of cultural evolution? It doesn’t make any sense. Suddenly, in the midst of a world that still uses flint axes and choppers, for a society to spring up that has mastered metals, engineering, architecture, even electricity—it’s crazy, Lora. I don’t get it. The old myths said that the Atlanteans were a great people, but not that they were miracle-workers.

Well, let that be for now. I have plenty of other things to tell you.

I’m pretty sure now that the place we set out from was the coast of Brittany. We all knew in advance back at Home Era, when we began focusing on members of the ruling caste as my target, that important members of the royal family made regular inspection tours of the coastal provinces and that if they aimed me at the mind of one of the high princes I was just likely to come down in ancient France as in Athilan itself.

Certainly the stone tools that the mainlanders were using were the sort of things used in France at this time. And the harbor was a good one. Whether Thibarak was Cherbourg or Le Havre, I can’t say; but unless I have my geography all cockeyed we have just sailed out through the English Channel—on the clear days it seemed to me I could see the English shore to the north—and now we are running far into the Atlantic, curving down past Portugal toward the mouth of the Mediterranean. Which is just where our archaeologists had decided was the most likely place for Atlantis to have been, of course—somewhere between the Canary Islands and the Azores.

The weather gets milder and warmer every day. Birds, soft breezes (even in the middle of an Ice Age winter!), drifting masses of seaweed. There is a lot of rain, virtually daily,but it’s a gentle kind of rain and when the sun comes out afterward the rainbows are heartbreaking. Especially when I stop to think that Atlantis lies at the end of them.

Life aboard ship is—

Uh-oh—trouble—

Six or seven hours later, same day.

A narrow escape. I was using the Prince to write this letter, and I almost got caught.

Ram was in his stateroom, sitting in one of the hammocklike things that they use on this ship. I had him under trance, and I was telling you all about the weather at sea when suddenly his personal steward came in. To tidy up the room, I suppose.

It isn’t the custom among the Athilantans to knock on doors. They make a kind of high whistling noise when they want to enter a room. I was so preoccupied with dictating my letter that I didn’t even notice. So in walks the steward, and he sees the heir to the imperial throne sitting bolt upright in his hammock with a weird trance look on his face.

“Your Highness!” he says. And then, in real terror, “Your Highness?!?”

He rushes over, seizes the Prince, shakes him hard. Well, you can bet I broke contact with the Prince’s mind right away. He snapped out of it and looked around in confusion and got angry with the steward for bothering him while he was trying to take a nap. That part went all right.

But I couldn’t put the Prince back into trance until the steward had left the cabin. And the steward took just long enough to get out of there so that the Prince had time to look down at the sheet of vellum he was holding, and stare at the nonsensical marks scribbled all over it.

So when the steward finally was gone, there was Prince Ram sitting there, wide awake, holding a sheet of vellum in one hand and an ink-stylus in the other, and the vellum was covered with strange marks. Marks that were, in fact, a script that nobody on Earth is going to be able to understand for another good many thousands of years.

He was absolutely mystified. He held it up close to his eyes, turned it upside down, shook his head in bewilderment. And I heard his thought loud and clear:

—What in the name of all the gods is THIS?

Well, I put him back to sleep and tried to get down into his mind and eradicate all memory of what he had just seen. As you know, that isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. You poke around in your carrier’s short-term memory, trying to blot out a particular incident, and if you’re not really careful, you can blot out half a day of other stuff, or a whole week, or even start ripping up the basic memory framework before you realize what you’re doing. I didn’t want to leave him feeling like an amnesia victim. So I tiptoed around in his memory bank, slicing here and there, doing my best. I think I did the job as nicely as anybody could have; but when I was done, I wasn’t entirely confident that I had completely cleaned things up.

I hid the letter. And then I hid myself, getting down into stasis and just sitting quietly in a subconscious corner of the Prince’s brain all afternoon. I didn’t try to make contact with his cerebral levels in any way whatever.

(That’s the hardest thing of all to do, I think—when you have to lay low, sitting tight, doing nothing. After all, we aren’t capable of going to sleep. And disembodied entities like us can’t just head out for a long walk to kill the time. So there we sit, unable even to twitch. Like prisoners in a cage no bigger than a human brain, absolutely immobilized, counting off seconds and minutes for lack of anything else to do. It’s maddening, isn’t it? It’s almost unbearable.)

I guess I could have used the time to prowl through the Prince’s basic memory storage to pick up a little useful data about the Athilantan civilization, but I didn’t dare. He might just be able to detect me poking around—a curious itchy feeling in his mind, let’s say. I didn’t want to arouse any more suspicions than I already had. And it seemed to me right then that there already was an odd new edge to the Prince’s mind, a kind of prickly wariness.

I’ve seen that happen before. But on other occasions, when my carrier has been allowed to get an inkling of the real situation, it has passed in a few hours. Sure enough, that’s what happened this time. Ram began to relax, the edge on his mind went away, he went about his princely duties as though nothing had occurred. And ten minutes ago he returned to his cabin to relax. I put him under trance and got this unfinished letter out of its hiding place.

What a strange business this is, hitchhiking through the past inside someone else’s mind! I’ve done it a dozen different times now, and I’m still not fully used to the idea. I’m not sure I really like it very much—treating another human being as a mere vehicle, moving him this way and that for your own convenience, going through his most intimate thoughts and memories as though he were nothing more than software available for scanning. Sometimes it seems a little ugly. Like being a spy, in a way. What it amounts to is that nobody who ever lived has any secrets from us timetraveling, twenty-first century nosybodies.

On the other hand, since it’s physically impossible for us to travel through time except as intangible electrical impulses, this is how we have to do it. And it does allow us to recapture all kinds of astounding knowledge that otherwise would have been lost forever in the bottomless sea of the past.