the arklings were just so much powder drifting from tunnel ceiling and wall.

The woman came back, seeming to float through the light. She brooded at him with her wise eyes. Travis could read the fear in them more distinctly, now.

She put out a hand and closed her warm fingers on his. She led him through the beams of pink light and into white brilliance, into a room that he had beheld briefly through the pink mists from the tunnel. The cone-towers were there, grouped by threes around the room. And the globes that rotated lazily overhead in orbits were fiery with golden luminescence. They warmed Travis as they floated.

In the middle of the room lay a huge crystal, scooped hollow by some long-dead artisan. It had indentations and mounds in it. Travis realized it was carved with exact care to fit a reclining body. From the walls of the crystal calyx stemmed thin golden wires, reaching across to the cones. And against the wall, humming and throbbing, were the dynamos and engines that fed the cones.

"I am Nuala," the girl said in her silvery voice. "I am of the Nekkalad, the first humanoid race in our universe. I have been encased in the calyx for eons. Unrememberable eons. I have seen the rise and fall of your planet, and the fall of others. I have seen—"

She broke off, shuddering.

Travis said wonderingly, "You look so young. If it weren't that Martin Kent told me about you, I'd—"

She let him look at her, standing with her eyes lowered. Travis had seen the landuli, the dancing girls raised by the princes of Orion-3; had seen the white-tressed houris of Venus; had seen the golden women bred for men's pleasure by the Kafars of Proxima Centauri. He had never seen anyone as lovely as this first woman. Her legs were long and white, her hips gently rounded. The high arch of her breasts were poetry.

And then she raised her lashes.

Her blue eyes were ancient as space itself, as filled with nameless knowledge, with wisdom beyond Travis's understanding. They had beheld all things, from the slug that came out of a borning world's ocean bottom to the scribblings of the universe's mightiest scientist. Her ears had heard the songs of Sull and the symphonies of Bach and Lyrn.

Travis was aware of all that staring into her eyes. He whispered, "But—how?"

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