The Cage

"The Cage" (1921) is a science fiction short story by J.D. Beresford, published in his 1921 collection Signs & Wonders.

Plot
While riding a London subway train, the narrator has a vision of a primitive ancestor of humanity, the first to have any consciousness of the future and the ability to plan. The narrator realizes that the primitive human cannot sense him directly, and attempts to give him a vision of the far future (the narrator's present). The psychic union is so shocking to the narrator that he is thrust back into the present, and reflects back on whether the primitive human could have understood anything of a subway train, or even that clothed men and women were of the same species as him, and whether he himself would be able to withstand a vision of the future.