THE ROSE PERFUME

Chapter 52

Everything in the field was empty. Emmanuel tells me that all the land around the time-machine was quiet and there were no signs of life. Not even birds in the trees. He said Greg told him that the time-machine kills everything in its path for miles and it turns animal blood into a jelly that clumps apart.

"Why didn't Raina go?" I ask.

"She didn't want to get her shoes dirty," He says. "We walked through mush and oil. My shoes sunk into it and turned black. I was afraid to touch them and didn't want them on my feet. I threw them out the window after we got back in the car."

He tells me there are dead animals out there that are not decomposing. No flies. No maggots or rotting flesh. The machine is bell-shaped and about nine-feet wide and fifteen-feet-high.

Inside there are two seats with seat-belts and controls on the ceiling. Thick small rectangular windows span all the way around. Greg told him to relax and it might make him dizzy because of the two cylinders outside that spin counter-clockwise.

Greg, Raina, and Emmeline left him there and called him on a radio inside the machine from a building twenty-minutes away. Greg told him to meditate on a question from the past or future that was important to him and the machine would take him there.

"I wanted to know," Emmanuel said to me, "What is the purpose of my life? Am I important? Does God have a special plan for me?"

The machine came to life and moved in a circular motion. Slow at first. Then gradually increased. His body fell forward against the straps holding him in and he floated in the air. Then he was propelled backward into the chair. His jowls and all the muscles in his face vibrated with turbulence. The windows were a blur of flashing lights. He passed out. When he came to he was slumped over in his chair. The machine had stopped. Not sure how long he was out. But he craned his neck to look out the window and what he saw jolted him to the core.

He floated over a pantheon-looking structure without a roof and a giant statue of Poseidon. It was carved into the top of the mountain on a pre-historic looking island that is more beautiful than anything his imagination could have surfaced. Vibrant health reflects in the land, the ocean, and sky and there is a river that divides the land in two. Impressions cut into the land and statues of sea-horses, birds, fish-people, and bulls. Buildings and roads above and below the water. Noises and smells of life are thick in the air. The smell of pollinating flowers, leafy trees, fresh mud, sand, and salt. Spiders webs, glimmering gold, and fresh marble, and flying machines. Teams of mermaids swimming over the waves in the ocean.

He saw a variety of different human species living together on the land. There were those laying back in hammocks, eating food served to them on platters. People working in orchards and farms picking fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Tossing them in their skirts or baskets. Others casting iron tools in brick stoves and dropping them into buckets of water. Hunters skinning animals and giving the meat to cooks and laying the hides over the sandal-makers fence. Miners milling in caves. And the ones working the flying machines, boats, and land rovers. The intellects in robes preying on the hillside and the ones standing outside the library with scrolls clutched under their arms.

But the most shocking of all was what he saw inside the building. People were gathered for a great event. Those with legs sat on the steps and those with tails stayed in the water. All waiting for the same news.

Emmanuel looked closer. He could not see what they did. He concentrated and then he was inside the body of one of the men inside the building. He was in a small pool of water and holding hands with five other people in a circle. He has the news everyone spectating is waiting for.