II

Staring at the shiny surface, he failed to notice the changes that had started to take place. Something sparkled in the cell, apparitions passed through it more transparent than ghosts, and the specter from the other bed instantly dissolved into nothingness.

His attention was attracted only by the sudden daylight in the high barred window.

Isn't it still early? he asked himself, raising his eyes in bewilderment.

But the time of miracles had just begun. His eyes barely had time to twinkle before it was dark in the window again. The astronomer in him opened his mouth to contest the obvious, but he was silenced by the stronger voice of the child who cares not at all whether something is possible or not, as long as it is fascinating.

Many short interchanges of light and darkness took place before the child had had enough of this monotonous kaleidoscope, finally letting the scientist think about solving the mystery. There was only one explanation, of course. To accept it, however, one had to accept the impossible almost as an act of faith.

Before him the days and nights were passing at accelerated speed, but he could not ask the questions dictated by his reason. He had lost that right the moment he took the watch. In any event, was the "how" important? If this was the way to travel to the future, so be it.

Finally the hypnotic flashes of blue-gray and black images in the stone window tired even the astronomer. He turned around-and at first it seemed that the dizzy rush through time had stopped. Nothing was moving, everything looked fixed, unchanging. And then he realized that it was only an illusion. There could be no rapid changes here: the monastery walls were built to withstand the centuries.

Nonetheless, there were a few things in the cell made of less durable material. He stood transfixed as he watched the boards on the bed across from him gradually swell up from the perpetual humidity and then split and fall to the ground, where they slowly turned into a shapeless mass on the flagstones.

He jumped up from his bed when it struck him that the same fate had to happen to the boards on which he was sitting. Sure enough, they also ended up as a pile of sawdust. He, however, had not felt a thing: if this possibility had not crossed his mind, he would have continued to sit calmly on nothing, in midair.

The wooden door was considerably thicker, but in the end it, too, succumbed to the effects of decay. First the steel bars fell off, then the hinges gave way, cracks appeared, then gaps and holes, until finally there was nothing to stop him from going into the corridor. The cell ceased to be a prison. But on the other side of the threshold, freedom was an impenetrable darkness since no one lit torches to dispel it anymore.

Thoughts of freedom reminded him of the many prisoners who must have sojourned here in misery after him. During this rapid movement through time he could not see them, of course, although here and there he had the deceptive feeling that there was someone else with him. During the instants of darkness that were nights, a shape seemed to bulge on the bed across from him, but this illusion was too brief to make anything of it. In the flashes of lightning that were days, something would flicker in front of him periodically, a certain hint of movement, but it was as cryptic as a flash seen out of the corner of the eye.

The ceiling disappeared so suddenly that he did not have time to catch his breath. It was there one moment and then suddenly gone without a trace, as though a giant had taken a huge lid off the monastery. At the same time, all the partition walls were removed, leaving only the solid outer walls that no longer had any windows.

The rapidly changing days and nights were incomparably more exciting with the entire firmament spread over his head than before, when he had only had a tiny corner of the sky. The entire universe seemed to be hurriedly whispering some secret message to him....

But he was not given the time to figure it out. Just as mysteriously as the lid was lost, it returned a few moments later, although not the old one. He found himself inside an enormous closed space over which there rose a gigantic dome. Only cathedrals boast such roofs, he thought, but this certainly was not a cathedral; their domes did not have a wide slit cut through the center, let alone a large cylinder pointing upward through that opening.

He did not realize that the voyage was over because there was no slowing down; it happened all at once. He was looking at the empty opening in the vault over his head, but many heartbeats had to pass before he finally noticed that the alternating light and darkness had stopped. The night sky that settled in his eyes was sprinkled with the clusters of stars found in the thin air of mountain peaks.

A click in his hand jolted him out of the paralysis that had overcome him. The watch had completely slipped his mind, although it had been in his outstretched palm the entire time. Now it had closed, since its magic work was finished. He first thought to put it in his pocket but then decided he should keep it in his hand; his first idea would have shown inadmissible disrespect.

He slowly and timidly began to turn around in the semi-darkness of the large area. As wondrous things whose purpose he could not divine entered his field of vision, he remembered the tempter's words; he had said that in the end he would have seen for himself that it was an astronomical observatory. The tempter must have greatly overestimated him. There was nothing here he could recognize: no telescope, sextant, map of the stars, or brass model of the planetary system.

Instead, the circular wall was covered for the most part with unusual windows. They shone in a variety of colors, but it could not have been the light from outside because it was dark. Some forms were moving on them, and he cautiously went up to one part of the wall to get a better look. They turned out to be yellow numbers that proceeded as far as the eye could see in horizontal rows against blue or red backgrounds, appearing at one end and disappearing at the other, although the device that was writing them was nowhere to be seen.