More than twenty years later this other man seems to have built a more exact version of the same thing, allegedly based on plans obtained in the same period.

The day after I built my device. I do remember being seized with a fierce urge to get away from the house. I went to my grandmother's country home with her, even though the occasion was one of her afternoon card parties.

About four the telephone at the country house rang. I can remember my grandmother saying, "House burned down? Mary Strieber's house burned down?" The blood just drained from me. Fortunately the entire house had not burned, only the roof over the wing containing my bedroom. The fire was never satisfactorily explained, although I have a feeling that it was related more to the effect a little boy's antigravity machine had on the wiring than to the hostility of annoyed visitors.

Fortunately for me, it never dawned .on my parents that I might have caused a disaster on this scale.

In July 1957 my father took my sister, who was then thirteen, and myself from San Antonio to Madison, Wisconsin, to see his sister and her family. We flew to Chicago and stayed at the Hilton, where I accidentally dropped a large milk shake out of a tenth-floor window. We spent the night at another hotel, and then traveled on to Madison to see the relatives. A week later we returned to San Antonio on the train.

All my life I have had a memory of that train, seen from above, rushing through the night.

Most of the windows are dark, which suggests that it is very late. There are thick pine woods, meaning that it must have been in Arkansas or farther north, for the Texas Eagle did not go through the pine forests of East Texas, but rather across the plains between Texarkana and Dallas and then south over rolling, featureless country.

For some reason I had never thought twice about the strange image of the speeding train.

Why would I have seen it from such a position? Can it be that I really was outside of it at some point?

I remembered absolutely nothing about being taken off the train. There was a sort of confused recollection of my father crouched at the back of an upper berth in our drawing room, his eyes bulging, his lips twisted back from his teeth. But I've always assumed that was a nightmare brought on by the fact that I was so sick on the trip. My illness was violent. I vomited until I thought I would die, and for no apparent reason. Nothing came up but bile, but the spasms simply would not stop.