Before I go much further, allow me to introduce myself, my background and what made me what I was before my adventures began. Despite the passage of so much time, I can still recollect my early years. Human memory is a wonderful thing! At this time of writing, the year would be, if calculated according to the way years were calculated when I was born, 8628 year of our Lord (‘a.d.’ or ‘c.e.’ which became the more popular usages later on. I’m among the few still alive that even remember that method of dating!). However, to be more accurate, I’ve lost close to one quarter of the intervening years from travelling at speeds close to and beyond that of light. For most of my life, I’ve not had access to the more advanced technology that enables one to travel away beyond the speed of light without altering one’s position in time (that technology has existed all along, but the ships so equipped cost a pretty penny to build, so they’re only used for inter-galactic travel). So you could say I’m roughly 4,000 years old. That’s my age in ‘body time’. We calculate our age by adding up our years in ‘chronological time’, minus those lost through ‘super-light-speed’ travel, to come up with our age in ‘body time’. Only now, am I beginning to feel old. In ‘natural’, or ‘Earth age’, I’m an eighty-year-old man. ‘Earth age’ is how we measure the actual ageing process — by calculating how many years one would have to live on Earth to obtain a similar affect on the body.
   So, where was I? Oh, yes, I was introducing myself. My name is Frederick Penning, and I was born in the village of St. Marvins-on-bourne in Southern England in the year 1872 a.d. My father, Greggory Penning, was a corn chandler, and a member of the Church of England; but my mother came from a Roman Catholic background. I was the second child, after my brother, Greggory Milford. After me, about ten years later, came my younger brother, William.
   That we were all christened C of E rather than Roman Catholic was more a matter of circumlocution than religious belief, as our neighbourhood had no Catholic church. On occasion, when visiting our mother’s relations, we went to mass, said the rosary, took the host and all the rest of it. Neither of my parents were so devout as to exclude the other’s religion.
   My father’s family was directly descended from one of the knights of the crusades, Sir Greggory Penning, of whom my father was quite proud. Indeed, he related many stories of his exploits in his campaigns against the infidels. We also greatly prided ourselves in the fact that our family had come to England with the Norman conquest.
   My upbringing was typical of what you would call the ‘middle class’ of that time. However, this wasn’t always the case with my family. Our fortunes began to look up a couple of years before I was born. Before that, my family, along with many of our neighbours in St. Marvins were heavily in debt to a Jewish money lender named Abraham Fischer. The stories I was told about him confirmed the stereotype we had of Jews in general. Abraham Fischer, I was given to believe, was Shylock magnified many times over — the very devil himself.
   Every now and then, when all the cousins and aunts and uncles were together, my father would tell the story of how he, himself, along with the towns folks got rid of the evil Jewish money lender as though it were a battle he himself had fought in one of the wars.
   One such gathering was on the last occasion I saw my father alive. At that time, he looked as healthy as he ever did and there was nothing about him to even hint that he would suddenly take sick one month after my return to boarding school, and die one week later.
   As usual, he was telling all the stories related to the demise of Abraham Fischer, including that of Miss Perkins, to whom he gave no rest day nor night, demanding what was left of her meagre savings, until one day, he foreclosed her knitting shop, which was her only means of support. About two other local merchants and farmers met with the same fate within a month of that. Father, himself, was on the verge of losing his grain feed shop as well. That’s when the time came to act.
   Indeed, there could have come no better time, as all of Mr. Fischer’s friends in high places, including the lord mayor and the magistrate had received their just deserts as the result of a political crises. As to Mr. Fischer’s misdeeds, they were common knowledge to all of the town’s folks. Things were known about him that would make one’s ears tingle! All that was needed was some substantiating evidence. In the end, they found this and charges were brought. The whole town suddenly showed up on his front lawn one morning, and assisted the constables in arresting him, and searching the house for further evidence.
   The trial was speedy, thanks to the good hearted man who stood in the office of the magistrate during the political vacuum, and within a week, the scoundrel was hanged.
   Father, out of the kindness of his heart, also assisted in pressing for further legal action to retrieve ill begotten gains on behalf of others of his victims. In one case, he, and three other men went himself with a summons and brought out numerous items of great value which had been bought with the blood and sweat of the town’s people. Finally, the Fischer house was confiscated by the crown. Abraham Fischer’s young widow, Elizabeth, was left with nothing, just like so many of her late husbands victims, such as poor Miss Perkins.
   My father, as becoming of his knightly forebear, helped Miss Perkins with a small loan to get her knitting shop back into operation.
   Elizabeth Fischer soon left the area, and was never heard of again in those parts. Now, there was no trace at all of the Fischer clan.
   On this occasion, my Father finally finish, with his wine glass lifted for a final sip, saying as an after thought, ‘Aye, I got my share of the booty, I did.’
   I remember that he had said this on a couple of other occasions. We were never quite sure what he meant by that, except that it probably referred to the fact that we were now debt free and had a prospering business, but my mother looked rather perturbed when he made that statement. There were certainly no heirlooms in our home gained from the Fischer household.
   My mother always kept her peace when the conversation turned to Abraham Fischer. In fact, I never heard a negative word from her lips concerning anyone. Her manner was always mild, whereas everyone on my father’s side were sharp tongued. Most of those in town were related to us in some way, through my father, and social gatherings were often marked with loud disputes. To my mother’s credit, however, she succeeded in teaching me to think before saying anything that would be of hurt to anyone else.
   All of this to-do in regards to Abraham Fischer affected my perception of the Jews as a whole, that is to say, Jews as being Jews. As time went on, I met many ‘good’ Jews — that is Jews who didn’t make it obvious that they were Jewish with their mannerisms, such as making snide comments while taking leery side glances, or using Yiddish phrases like ‘Oi gevalt!’ and ‘meshuggener’. I began to accept those ones on that condition that they would act as normal as possible, or what I thought to be normal. I always had a deep suspicion of people who looked and acted like Jews, or were heavily involved in Jewish things and speaking Yiddish, or were seen constantly cajoling for some new money making scheme or other.
   At my boarding school I was taught Greek and Latin (both of which actually turned out quite useful). It was then, as I said, my father passed away. Greggory, my older brother inherited the house on the condition that he take care of my mother, while William and I were left with a trust that would see us through school and beyond.
   In university, I became close friends with a class-mate named Patrick Hanna from Belfast, in the Protestant sector of Ireland. A real Protestant’s Protestant he was indeed. What apprehensions I had towards Jews, he had towards Catholics. Like me, he learned to accept and even appreciate ‘good’ Catholics, or anyone who wasn’t a religious Catholic. Indeed, our immediate circle of friends included both Jews and Catholics, but of the type that could always be counted on to put in a bad word or two about their fellow Catholics for their over dogmatism; or their fellow Jews for their over-strict kosher observances. Patrick, however, reserved to himself the right to be a religious Protestant. In those days, that was the least offensive of all religious cultures.
   Patrick, like myself, was also of quasi-aristocratic background. Just as my family prided itself in our common noble ancestor, Sir Greggory Penning; Patrick took delight in his name-sake, Sir Patrick A’Hanna, of Sorbie castle, Galloway, Scotland, from whence his forefathers migrated to Northern Ireland. We used to dwell at length on our respective family histories.
   How he and I could have otherwise became so close, I don’t know. With my mother being a Catholic, and with my own revulsion towards anything overly religious in any direction, Patrick and I were regarded as opposites. Perhaps we were the type of opposites that attract one another.
   We both took a course of study that gave us a lot of exposure to Latin, so much so that we often conversed in it when we didn’t want others to understand us. The second year we were at the university, which turned out to be our final year, we became room-mates. During the summer holidays following that year, we decided to go for an excursion to the climes beyond in order to expand our horizons and exercise our knowledge of French.
   I won’t say here which countries we actually visited because that would give away where the port was, from which our real adventures began. Being that this message is being transmitted backwards in time into the second millennium a.d. this knowledge could have damaging consequences that could alter history to some extant. Suffice it to say that we were near the border of two countries.
   We had travelled on foot for quite a ways so as to save money and had put up at a local inn. It seemed to be a popular inn among world travellers such as ourselves. Indeed, it had been recommended to us by a fellow countryman we met in the city we had just left.
   I remember we were sitting in the tavern where a number of other travellers were eating and drinking. A lot of the conversation was in French and some in English. It was a different type of crowd from what one normally finds at inns like this. The guests were more subdued, except for a couple of boisterous ones — one in particular who sat at the next table from us. He would make loud remarks to this one and that, as one normally did at the taverns in our country, mostly in English, but sometimes in broken French. Others were doing their best to ignore him. He was obviously unused to this kind of treatment and this only made him even more boisterous.
   One middle aged man had come to sit at our table, and was casually asking us in French about ourselves and about recent events where we came from. Usually, we were so busy telling him about our homes and our life at the university and the latest news that we hardly got around to asking him about his own life. On the one or two times that we did, he skirted the issue by asking us yet more questions — but in a friendly way so that it didn’t appear that he had anything to hide or that he was being unnaturally inquisitive. I was under a vague impression that he had been away from our part of the world for a long time and was trying to become current.
   We had both told him our names, and I told him early on about St. Marvins, where I was born.
   ‘St. Marvins-on-bourne,’ he said, finally. ‘It seems I know of that place. Would you know of a gentleman named Fischer?’
   ‘Abraham Fischer?’ I said in surprise.
   ‘Yes. I never met him myself, but I had heard that he was from that town.’
   ‘Well,’ I said, trying to cover up my feelings, ‘I think he died before I was born, so I never really got to know much about him.’
   There was much more I could have said, but I had the feeling like this could be the wrong company in which to say what I knew.
   He went on to a completely different subject, almost as though he knew he had broached a sensitive issue. At the same time, it began to occur to me that our friend had a distinct Jewish look about him.
   My thoughts were interrupted when another boisterous old man came in and sat down with the loud-mouth who was sitting at the table next to us and began telling him in the dialect of one of the Northern English counties, of a strange sight he had seen the evening before.
   ‘I tell you! It was like a giant silver ball, and flew it did, right through the air!’
   ‘Nothing flies lest there's someone to throws it,’ said his friend. ‘A rolling pin, perhaps. My wife gives the power of flight to such — but a giant silver ball? No chance!’
   ‘Aye, but the thing didn’t fly as something thrown, but as a whiff of cloud!’
   The others in the room in our immediate area gave no more than knowing glances, and smiles. At first we thought it was because they all knew the man as a lunatic, but then, I thought, since they were all travellers, how could they know him so well?
   ‘Hah!’ said his companion. ‘You’d been at the bottle!’
   ‘No!’ he insisted. ‘Stone sober I was! By the gods I swear, I saw it come from over Eastward and straight over my head it went; then disappeared, it did, behind the trees and over the hill!’
   One man sitting with a group on the other side of us said out loud to his companions, ‘That would be the craft we came in on.’
   ‘I’ll wager you were drinking,’ said the other loud mouth gentleman to his friend.
   ‘No! I tell you! It wasn’t until after I saw the sight that I went for a drink!’
   ‘Then you drank too much, you did, and it jarred your memory!’
   My friend, Patrick, being the quick witted individual that he was, turned to the gentleman on the other side who had spoken about having come in on the craft, and answered him, ‘You don’t say! When did you arrive?’
   ‘Late last evening,’ was the reply. ‘We just got in from a short holiday on the planetoid Lactid.’
   ‘Oh! And how did you find the weather there?’ asked Patrick. I think he had assumed that, with the talk about flying silver balls, all conversation had made a sudden departure from reality, and he just decided to follow suit.
   ‘There is no weather on Lactid. Everything’s enclosed there!’
   In the mean time, our older friend who had been sitting at our table was just about choking. I gave him a thump on the back as the man who had been talking to Patrick said:
   ‘Are you all right there Clarence?’
   ‘I’m all right thanks,’ said Clarence finally, taking a sip of his drink to clear his passages. Then he turned to the other, and said, ‘Morris, these two gentlemen don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. They’re still earth-bound.’
   Morris suddenly looked terrified, as though he had just committed a major breach of etiquette.
   The two boisterous ones on the other side were too busy arguing loudly the existence of the flying silver ball to hear our discussion. I, in the mean time, was racking my head trying to determine if the silver ball whose existence was in dispute was indeed the ‘craft’ on which the party on the other side of us was alleged to have arrived from ‘Lactid’. It was Patrick, though, that had the presence of mind to carry on inquiring on the subject, with only a very slight edge to his tone to suggested he was humouring a room full of raging lunatics.
   ‘So, how does one arrange passage to this holiday resort of "Lactid" aboard your craft?’ he asked.
   Clarence was the one who answered. ‘I suppose that you two gentlemen seem respectable enough to be let in on the secret — especially as the cat has been let out of the bag, kindness of our friend Morris;’ he gave a meaningful glance across to Morris.
   Glancing carefully at the two boisterous ones to make sure they were still immersed in their discussion, than back to us, he said in slightly lower tones, ‘There are a number of us who spend much of our time away from this planet. Close to here is one of the ports from which we often embark on our travels.’ He seemed to be directing his remarks more to me than to Patrick.
   All the while, I was looking for any sign that he was joking. Seeing none, a part of me was telling me that this man, Clarence, and his friend, Morris, were more lunatic than the loud and very drunk man on the other side of us. At least his case could be explained in that he was drunk.
   On the other hand, the serious and yet casual expressions on the faces of Clarence and Morris, and also of those seated with Morris at the other table made it equally hard to believe they could be letting on.
   ‘The area just North of here, up towards the ridge, is actually in a section that is not claimed by either this nation nor its neighbour. Being in a wild area, each assumes that it belongs to the other. On the road, the frontiers are quite close together — close enough for it to seem like a normal frontier crossing. But, between the two frontier guard posts, as you go North of here, is a barely traceable foot path leading Eastward. At that point you won’t be noticed by those guarding either post, but go quietly just the same, and try to keep the path looking as unused as possible. It is as you go down that foot path that the frontier widens. Go about five miles or so until you come to what looks like an old battery with a flat roof, having taken enough food with you to last a week. When you get to the battery, which is really a port house, get up upon to the roof, and look for a large rod that is connected to the roof by a hinge. Pull that rod so that it stands upright. That will turn on a beacon sending invisible rays of light into the heavens. Having done that, get down inside the port house and wait. Old man Anselmo should be by in about a week with his silver sphere.’
   ‘Make sure it’s a silver sphere,’ said Morris, ‘and not a dish, nor an object with flashing colours.’
   ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Clarence. ‘Those haven’t been seen in these parts for the last hundred years. Old man Anselmo will steer you clear of those.’
   Patrick and I finally went upstairs to our quarters with visions of flying spheres dancing in our heads.
   ‘What do you think?’ I said. I meant, what did Patrick think about these people and their flying spheres. Patrick took it differently.
   ‘I say let’s go up to the old battery tomorrow and take a holiday in Lactid.’
   I knew there would be no turning back from whatever adventure Patrick was determined to undertake. At least a camping trip in middle of the wooded hills in no-man’s-land with a week’s supply of food would be an enjoyable experience, flying spheres or no.
   Only one question nagged at my mind. In what connection did Clarence know about Abraham Fischer?