I thought then I had better leave the rooftop. I started the Frazia 'copters, and rose about a thousand feet. Then I slowed them down until a balance with gravity was maintained, and I hung stationary. You may be surprised that the flying mechanism was effective while I was sweeping so swiftly through time. If our atmosphere did not persist in time, the propellers would have exerted no pressure against it. But the air does persist, and so does gravity. There was apparently no wind. The transient winds and storms of a few hours were all blended. The result, however, must have been a slight influence to the north, for I found myself drifting very slowly in that direction. After a few moments my time-velocity had so increased that even that drift was averaged. I hung motionless. From this height--a thousand feet above the southern boundary of Central Park--the scene below me was a strange one. At first glance, I might have been hanging in a balloon on a dull, soundless day very heavily overcast. Except that the sky, instead of showing dark clouds, was a queer, luminous gray blur that distinguished nothing. The city below me lay clear cut but absolutely shadowless, which gave it a very extraordinary look of flatness--a vista of buildings painted upon a huge, concave canvas. Colors were distinguishable, but they were abnormally grayish and drab. Vague, unreal pencil points of light dotted the scene--electric lights that were on every night in the same spots, and off in the daytime--the blended effect of which was visible. There was no sound. Nor was there motion. It looked like a dead, empty city. The streets seemed deserted, with not even a blur to mark those millions of transitory movements of humans and vehicles that I knew were taking place. I had been conscious of a brief period of chill, and for a moment or two the scene had assumed a whiter aspect, especially in the park. I conceived this as a blending of several heavy, lingering snowfalls of the winter. The lowest dial, marking days, now showed only a blur as its pointer swept around. And the year-dial pointer was visibly moving. I had passed one year and was well into the second. The clock showed ten thirty. I had been gone forty minutes! I said there was no visible movement in the scene beneath me. That was so, at first, but I soon began to see plenty of movement. The white look had come and gone again--far briefer this time--when my attention was caught by a building on Broadway, along in the Fifties somewhere. It was a broad but low building, no more than eight or ten stories high; the lowest in its immediate vicinity. It seemed now to be melting before my eyes! That is the only way I can describe it--melting. Parts of it were vanishing! It was dismembering, as though piece by piece it was being taken apart and carried away. Which, of course, is exactly what was happening.