Indeed, the spiritually uplifting song "Heaven Can Wait" snaps Iron Maiden out of their morbid depression. They must stop being time's puppets and learn to control their destiny! That is the moral in "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" which boasts lines like "I've got to keep running the course / I've got to keep running and win at all costs / I've got to keep going to be strong / Must be so determined and push myself on." (Very similar to "Marathon," a song by Rush, another band I suspect can harness the powers of quantum physics. But that's another story.)

Iron Maiden finally makes it. They are now traveling space-time at whim, but is it really all it's cracked up to be? Everywhere they go, they're not familiar with local customs. They are constantly out of place and out of step. They are, as the next song points out, "Stranger(s) in a Strange Land." Ironically, they are free to travel time, but still feel "Trapped here in this prison, lost and far from home."

Exhausted and disappointed, they finally return to their original point in space-time. But things are different. Whether their present has been changed, or they're sensitive to the actions in parallel universes they created, they are experiencing extreme "Déjà vu": "Cause you know this has happened before / And you know that this moment in time is for real / And you know when you feel déjà vu / Feel like I've been here before, feel like I've been here before."

So after all these adventures through the vortex of time, what was Iron Maiden's favorite part? Meeting "Alexander the Great" of course! Here's what they say about the man in our past that impressed them the most, in the epic last song on this fascinating album: "Alexander the Great, his name struck fear into hearts of man / Alexander the Great, he died of fever in Babylon."