leapt into the waters of the Neva. I heard nothing of the finger for several weeks, being a notorious drunkard, but then heard tell from my good friend, Constable Arkady Bodganovich, of a disembodied finger that had been appearing at social functions in the guise of a State's Councillor. Being somewhat nearsighted, he had to look twice, but discerned quite definitely that it was a finger and not a man of high rank. Unfortunately, he said, my finger was quite beyond my reach, for it had absconded with a time machine on display at the Academy of Natural Philosophy and traveled forward to the year 3460.
I was not about to give up hope. Fortifying myself with spirits, I journeyed to a desolate plain outside Irkutsk where I packed myself carefully in ice to await the coming of the year 3460. It seemed only a moment, then the clanging of the alarm clock I had placed by my icy bed awoke me.
But the fate of my finger would soon become uninteresting, less than uninteresting, a nothing! For I had arrived in the yet-to-be: where every man may have a teardrop-shaped living compartment of gold-tinted glass, mobile and capable of flying through aether or total submersion, so that he may live in one city one day and another the next, locked happily into glass beehives; where all know the beauty of Number, and symphony consists of the subtle ascension from the Quadratic to the Cubic; where all men may read news of distant lands on the World-wide Web that unites humanity, constructed of massive clockwork mechanisms at city squares, connected by whirling shafts of actinic lightning; where the study of the Poem has given way to that of the deep meaning inherent in the Morpheme, where an artificial sun one mile above Moscow rains light and nitrogenated fertilizer upon the land; where a man may be a poet one day, meditating upon the truths of SHCH and KH, and a potentate the next, and a dirigible upon the third day! I rose into the air and moored myself to the summit of the Monument to the Eighteenth International that stands over Antagrad, Odelystok, and Utasibirsk like a steel colossus, and knew: here, a man may be a god! And that god shall have the shape of: the RECTANGLE!