"I'm going with him—out in the open! I'm going to show him what we need!"

Hatcher. McCray recognized that this was a name—the name of the entity closest to himself, the one that had somehow manipulated his forebrain and released the mind from the prison of the skull. "Hatcher" was not a word but an image, and in the image he saw a creature whose physical shape was unpleasant, but whose instincts and hopes were enough like his own to provide common ground.

He saw more than that. This Hatcher was trying to persuade him to move. To venture farther. To come with him....

McCray allowed himself to be lead and at once he was outside not only of his own body but of all bodies. He was free in space.

The entity that had been born of Herrell McCray was now larger than a sun. He could see, all around him, the wonder and beauty of the great gas cloud in which his body rested, on one tiny planet of one trivial star. His sense of time was not changed from what it had been—he could count the pulses of his own body, still thudding in what, however remote, was his ear—but he could see things that were terribly slow and vast. He could see the friction of the streamers of gas in the cloud as light-pressure drove them outward. He could hear the subtle emanations of ion clashing with hurtling ion. He could see the great blue new suns tunneling through the cloud, building their strength out of the diffuse contaminated hydrogen that made the Orion nebula, leaving relatively clear "holes" behind them. He could see into the gas and through it. He could perceive each star and gassy comet; and he could behold the ordered magnificence of the galaxy of stars, and the universe of galaxies, beyond.

The presence beside him was urging him to look beyond, into a denser, richer region of suns. McCray, unsure of his powers, stretched toward it—and recoiled.

There was something there which was terrifying, something cold and restless that watched him come toward it with the eyes of a crouched panther awaiting a deer.

The presence beside him felt the same terror, McCray knew. He was grateful when Hatcher allowed him to look away from the central clusters and return to the immediate neighborhood of his body.

Like a child's toy in a diminishing glass, McCray could see the planet he had left.

But it was no planet. It was not a planet, but a great irregular sphere of metal, honeycombed and warrened. He would 

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