After dinner on their first evening in the Beach Hotel with the old professor talking about cosmology, and his daughter chatting about art, Mr Tompkins finally got to his room, collapsed on to the bed, and pulled the blanket over his head. Botticelli and Bondi, Salvador Dali and Fred Hoyle, Lemaître and La Fontaine got all mixed up in his tired brain, and finally he fell into a deep sleep.…

Sometime in the middle of the night he woke up with a strange feeling that instead of lying on a comfortable spring mattress he was lying on something hard. He opened his eyes and found himself prostrated on what he first thought to be a big rock on the seashore. Later he discovered that it was actually a very big rock, about 30 feet in diameter, suspended in space without any visible support. The rock was covered with some green moss, and in a few places little bushes were growing from cracks in the stone. The space around the rock was illuminated by some glimmering light and was very dusty. In fact, there was more dust in the air than he had ever seen, even in the films representing dust storms in the middle west. He tied his handkerchief round his nose and felt, after this, considerably relieved. But there were more dangerous things than the dust in the surrounding space.