He stirred uneasily in the chair.

'What time is it? he asked. 'How long was I gone?

'It is almost two o'clock, said the House. 'You went away at eight or very shortly after.

Six hours, he thought, and he could account for two of them at most. What had happened in those other four hours and why could he not recall them? For that matter, why could he not recall the time when he had been in space and the time before he was in space? Why must his life start with that moment he had opened his eyes in a hospital bed in Washington? There had been another time, there had been other years. He once had held a name and history — and what had happened to blot it all away?

The rabbit finished its munching of the clover and went hopping off. The bird sat on the limb, no longer singing. A squirrel ran head-first down a tree trunk, halted two feet above the ground, spun like a flash and scurried up again. It reached a limb and ran out on it for a way, then halted, poised, its tail jerking in excitement.

Like sitting in a window, Blake thought, gazing out at the woodland scene — for there was no flatness to it. It had depth and perspective and the colour of the landscape was no painted colour, but the colour one would know if he had looked upon an actual scene.

The House still puzzled and disturbed him, at times made him uncomfortable. There was nothing in his background memory that had prepared him for anything like this. Although he could recall, in that misty time before complete forgetfulness closed down, that someone (whose name he could not recall) had cracked the enigma of gravity and that functioning solar power had been commonplace.

But while the house was energized by its solar power plant and was mobile by virtue of its anti-gravity apparatus, it was much more than that.