“Is my father alive?” I asked, staring anxiously into his calm face.

“Yes, of course,” he answered, calmly meeting my questioning eyes. “That is, within the limits imposed by the situation,” he added, half closing his eyes. “You know as well as I that from the point of view of your home, from the perspective of your own country, your father is dead. This cannot be entirely remedied. That death throws a certain shadow on his existence here.”

“But does Father himself know it, does he guess?” I asked him in a whisper.

He shook his head with deep conviction. “Don’t worry,” he said in a low voice. “None of our patients know it, or can guess. The whole secret of the operation… is that we have put the clock back. Here we are always late by a certain interval of time of which we cannot define the length. The whole thing is a matter of simple relativity. Here your father’s death, the death that has already struck him in your country, has not occurred yet.”

“In that case,” I said, “my father must be on his deathbed or about to die.”

“You don’t understand me… Here we reactivate time past, with all its possibilities, therefore also including the possibility of a recovery.”