their finite minds. He wrote: We are the flitting forms of a being greater than ourselves, and endless while we die. Our bodies are cells in the body of the race, our race is an incident in the drama of life; our minds are the fitful flashes of an eternal light. Our mind, in so far as it understands, is an eternal mode of thinking, which is determined by another mode of thinking, and this one again by another, and so on to infinity. That was magnificent. While others who caught inklings of the truth believed that I was an ultimate being, he realized that I, too, had an ultimate being whom I worshipped."

"Also, if he had been able to perceive how close you were to death," the second entity said, "he would have realized that you were mortal, which no ultimate being can be."

"How were you able to circumvent the disaster that so nearly befell me?"

"I sent a segment of my own mentality into your conceived world. I gave it a name, implanted a memory of a past into its mind, and that same memory into the minds of those creatures with whom it was supposed to have come into contact, in its past. Through that segment I was able to destroy the awful potentiality, as well as the creature who controlled it. The secret now rests with the dead."

"Is there any chance of a similar recurrence?"

"That chance will always exist as long as you persist in allowing your creatures to have free will. I would advise you to destroy it."

For a time the patient was silent. "No," it said finally, "without that free will their existence and my entire project would be futile. I will let the free will remain and bear any consequences."

"That, of course, is your own choosing," the other said.

And so man kept his greatest possession.

 Prev. P 27/27