Sebastian had dreamed of meeting with Aristotle and the like, long before he had come to know Prester Charles on the invasion of Governor Soto into La Florida in what seemed an unthinkably distant past. As a young brother at the abbey he had dreamed of conversations with the scholars of antiquity, perhaps held in Heaven, Hell or Purgatory. Among the friars and priests attending Governor Soto Sebastian had been known as the ‘apostate’ and had served after dinner mainly as an adversary for the more learned members of the clergy. This would have been a perilous way to conduct himself in the Old World, but in La Florida who cared? There was as yet no Inquisition to keep track of heretical statements in the New World.

So Prester Charles, then thought by Sebastian and the other clergy of the expedition to be an Ethiopian Legate to King Prester John, was drawn to Sebastian first as an opponent in the evening wine debates. Little did Sebastian know that the tall black man was actually a time-traveler, indeed the inventor of time-travel, from the distant 21st Century! Eventually Prester Charles had revealed himself to Sebastian as Professor Charles Carver Robinson.

Almost immediately and with slight effort he then convinced Sebastian to accompany him back to the future, where he might abandon the unnatural strictures of the ever-watching Church, and pursue the most liberal education imaginable. Sebastian, born an orphan in the hills of medieval Navarre, would now—a relation to Time that I must henceforth regarded more subjectively—serve as an ambassador to the great minds of the past.

No greater purpose could have been offered to the poor waif from Navarre. And here he stands holding the same hoop held by two beauties of the future—female intellectuals, who would have imagined—prepared to leap across the ages for a meeting with Aristotle!

Sebastian was elated, and, when the hoop whooped and levitated, and the three of them grabbed hold in the darkness as the giant Hoost and his evil man stood guard and looked away out into the shadowy night, he saw the red star above!

Take me Angel Time. Take me to a world before the All-seeing Eye of the Universal Church!

The earth seemed to shift under him and he was struck by lightning. Thought and action were now impossibilities as he scattered, and joined, and then raced through an opening—or was it closing upon his disembodied soul—in the cosmos, and he was gone; a dream flitting through the Darkness that lay upon The Deep…