Page:Melbourne and Mars.djvu/54

 out without danger. Down Swanston-street, half of me knowing half of me dreaming, through noise, smoke, dust, crushing and crowding to a station and a train, and cries of 'hurry up! hurry up!' A slamming and a banging, a hoarse shriek, a jerk, and we are moving to the accompaniment of grinding and roaring. Surely here the main study of everyone is how to make life miserable for everybody else.

More clang and bang, more roar and shriek, more hurry and rush and crush, more striving to be first through narrow gates and we are in a suburb. Here the buildings are farther apart, and there is a patch of garden ground here and there, but these are mostly neglected. Home? Yes, and that elderly lady my wife? Why she is older than my mother's mother. That bearded pard my son? He is surely older than my father. 'Come along, dad; you look a bit tired. Had a lot of stair-climbing to-day I suppose.'

'Yes, my son. It is as I thought; you are living a double life.'

I looked around dazed. My old friend is sitting opposite, and a gentle oscillation now and then reminds me that I am in a railway train travelling one hundred miles an hour towards the Metropolis of Mars. Four broad gauge lines: two central ones for express traffic and outside lines for stopping trains.

'I hope you will excuse me. I do not understand. Must have been asleep, sorry'—

'No! no, boy. I was just telling you; you are living a double life.'

'Oh! I remember; you sent me into something like sleep, and I have had a strange dream.'

'That was no dream; it was an episode. Just half-an-hour of the other life you are living. I was with you all the time, and I saw and heard all that you saw and heard. On earth you are about sixty-three years of age. These years are about half the length of ours, you know. You are in business as a commission agent in Melbourne, the capital of Australia; you have a wife to whom you have been married thirty-eight years, and your eldest son, whom you saw, is about twice your age. He is nearly thirty-seven, and a family man.'

'But I know nothing of this; how is it possible?'

'That I cannot explain. The phenomenon is rare, but it is mine as well as yours. I am an earth born, and forty years ago, earth years, I was teaching a school in that very city of Melbourne, then an infant city. I transferred about that time, but have not lost my interest in earth life, and I keep a constant lookout for such as you. That is my reason for ascertaining your identity. Sooner or later I should have sought you had not accident thrown us together.'

'You say 'transferred' about forty years ago?'

'Yes, that is what I call it. My soul, or the Ego, had no further use for