Tick.... tick.... tick.... The colossal clock hurled its living echoes into the room. Unseen. Unheard. At the first tick of twenty past midnight the professor of mysticism began an impromptu lecture on the meaning of time, clarifying concepts the guests may have sensed, may have tapped along the edge of, but of depths eschewed for fear of losing one's orientation. Tick.... tick.... tick.... The instrument of chronology celebrated the seconds in its steady mechanical way, issuing moments that fell like specks of sand from a point infinitely above to a destination far below - the dunes of eternity. Those with vision might snatch a kernel out of the invisible, synchronized stream, and live it, before its occurrence. The professor expounded the concept of projecting one's mind minutes, days, years into one's future and returning with premonitions retrieved out of a remembrance of the gap between that new time and the past. Tick.... tick.... tick.... The person so projected would perceive only a minute discontinuity as insignificant as the momentary loss of vision when an eye is blinked. Upon return, the sudden presence of a new idea would distract from its origin in the times unborn. Tick.... tick.... tick.... The professor spoke his engrossing lecture extending into hours, if anyone present had made inventory of the ticks of that massive mechanism that is always among us, unseen and unheard. After uttering the final syllable of his thesis, the professor glanced at his listeners and vanished. Tick.... tick.... tick.... It was exactly twenty past midnight.

Story #311

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