I can remember taking about three puffs at this, and then putting it out. Then I can remember shaking hands with both of them, and walking, or rather climbing, into the Asteradio itself, without any sort of ado. A moment afterwards the door was closed.

There have been so many thousands of descriptions of the Asteradio, and so many photographs and drawings of it published in the Press, that it would be idle for me to add anything of that sort here. The superficial appearance of this extraordinary piece of mechanism—if ‘mechanism’ is a legitimate word—resembling, as it always does to me, a sort of mad cross between a telephone booth, a cabinet gramophone, an electric chair, a lift, a wardrobe mirror, an Iron Maiden and a huge camera—is as well known to any man in the street as it is by myself. The only thing, I believe, which nearly always impresses those who have actually beheld it, ‘in the flesh,’ however, is the extraordinary air it has of crudity, of being a contraption, ‘put together’ in a haphazard way. I do not know what exactly it is that one finds lacking—something, I think, in greater dramatic accordance with its world-shaking potentialities, something more glittering, piercingly efficient and mysterious, something, in other words, more in the Mad Scientist tradition. What you actually see is something you feel your younger boy could have put together at home.

I am afraid, then, that those of my readers will be disappointed who had hoped that I might be able to throw any fresh light upon the invention itself. And here I should also make it clear that I am not in a position to make any contribution to any of those other controversies concerning time, dual presence, and identity which are raging around us now. I know the main question the layman wants to ask. Was my body, in the months in which I was millions of miles away in space, at one and the same time enclosed in the Asteradio machine on the third floor of Chandos Street? I cannot answer that question. Crowmarsh continually reiterates that that ‘is not putting the question in the right way.’ We are left in the dark, and sometimes forced to wish that he would be good enough to put the question in the ‘right way’ himself, and give us the right answer! But so far he has given no sign of doing that.

The point here is that I, having made by this machine the most momentous journey in the history of mankind, am as ignorant of the nature of my means of transport as any man in the street. I can only describe my sensations, and leave it at that.

Many people have asked me, not without a certain awed look on their faces, what my feelings were when the door was closed, and I knew the moment had come. I am afraid I am a disappointment even here as well, for that merciful feeling of numbness still persisted, and I had no sensations whatever—at least no sensations other than those of detached curiosity as to what was to befall that remote—that not totally credible figure—myself. As is known, the Asteradio is lit inside with what appears to be a common-or-garden electric bulb. I sat there, looking in turn at the five reflections of myself in the famous five steel mirrors which enclosed me all about. I remember remarking to myself what an ideal contraption this would be for a vain woman, and thinking that Crowmarsh at least should be able to sell his invention to the hairdressing profession if all else failed. Then I looked straight ahead at the reflection dead in front of me, and waited for the works to begin.

They were not tardy in giving me the works. I could just hear them moving about outside, and I sensed an air of bustle and excitement conspicuously lacking in their behaviour a few minutes ago. I heard Baldock give a sort of shout, and then there was a bang, and what I fancied was a curse, as though a table had been overturned accidentally. Finally there came a long droning sound, which was followed by the chug-chugging of what sounded more like the engine of a motor boat than anything else on earth. With this was combined an occasional rumbling noise, as of a distant sliding door.

I cannot possibly describe how incongruous and inadequate to the greatness and the seriousness of the occasion the next few minutes were. The chugging stopped—the droning began again—the droning stopped—the chugging began again—there was a pause in which nothing happened at all. I might have been in some third-rate Swiss train which for some reason could not get out of its station. Again I heard sounds of bustling and banging outside. I surmised that something had gone wrong, and that the whole thing was developing into a farce. Indeed I was just beginning to speculate as to whether I might cry out in question or protest to those outside, when I began to feel that something was happening.

I don’t know how it was, but it seemed all at once as though the guard had blown his whistle. The droning sound began to coincide with the sound of the ‘motor boat’ and both increased in volume. The steel mirrors began to rattle, and I found that I was being gently shaken. Yet panic still was held at bay.

What things happened next to me, and the order in which they happened, are almost impossible to recapture, let alone to relate. I think the next thing I was aware of was the fact that the electric light within was burning with extraordinary, with ferocious, brightness, and at the same time I realized in a flash that I was intolerably hot and almost gasping for air.