First I want you all to know, I'm quite safe and well. _Mamita_ dear, please try not to worry about me. Remember, Father we anticipated I might decide it best to send you a message. I do hope I have calculated the space-and time-factors correctly, and that I've set the mechanisms of the cube so that it will come back to you within a day or two after my departure. I'm assuming that is so. You will understand, of course, that as I have lived time, it has been far longer than that. Much has happened to me, and I want to tell you now what I can of it. You recall that night when I left you--to me now it seems so long ago. I remember your solemn faces as I closed the door of the cabin after me. I was in the forward one of the three compartments--you saw it when you inspected the plane the night I started. In this compartment are the controls for the Frazia motors and the flying controls. The controls of my own mechanism are there also. These are simple; merely a switch to regulate the proton current, as Father and I call it, and a series of small dials for recording the time-change. These dials are geared, with one for days, another for days in multiples of ten, one for years, and others for years in multiples of tens, hundreds, and thousands. I took my seat behind the Frazia controls. I was not going to use them at once, because there was no immediate need to raise the plane into the air. But I wanted to be seated; I could not tell what the shock of starting might be. The dials and switch were on the wall at my right. I moved the lever of the switch over to the first intensity. There was a low hum. The floor seemed to rock under me. The humming increased; it roared in my ears. Everything was vibrating with an infinitely tiny, trembling quiver that penetrated into my body, into my bones, even coursed through my blood. They were swift sensations, I suppose, lasting no more than a few seconds. I felt, as near as I can explain it, as though some force that holds my own body together, cell by cell, were being tampered with; as if, had the struggle continued, I might be shattered into a myriad of tiny fragments, like a puff of exploded powder. The humming grew still louder, and I remember trying to stand up. A wild impulse to throw back the switch and stop the thing came to me, but I resisted it. Then I was conscious of a sensation of falling headlong; a dizzy, sickening reeling of the senses, rather than the body. I lost consciousness--for only a moment or two, I think. I was sitting in my seat, uninjured. The humming was still in my ears, insistent. But it was not so loud as I had thought, and after a time I forgot it almost entirely.