“Dr. Black,” Gresham was saying in that strained, doubtful voice. “Dr. Black, how are you on psychiatry?”

“Why, fair.” Black kept the surprise out of his tone with an effort. “Why?”

“Have you noticed any symptoms of—aberration in me?”

“Nothing unusual. Nervous shock, of course. That atomic blast catching you certainly would have caused a strain.”

Gresham said, “After the blast went off I floated for I don’t know how long before you picked me up. I—started to imagine things. Delirium, you could say. But I don’t know. I—forget it, will you? Maybe later I’ll feel like talking. Just forget I said anything, Dr. Black.”

After all, there was nothing to talk about, to put into coherent words. For what had happened was inexplicable. It was part of the terra incognita that the key of nuclear energy had unlocked.

Even Daniel Gresham, drowsing the years away in his tropical lotuslands, could not help hearing about the new atomic experiments. He had stopped keeping track of time back in 1946, because around the archipelagoes time was a variable, and hours could last for seconds or months, depending on whether you were at a kava-kava festival with the golden-skinned Melanesians or simply stretched flat on the warm deck, while white canvas billowed overhead and waves splashed quietly along the keel.

But the radio wouldn’t stop talking. It talked about the uranium piles constructed for experiments, and the new lithium hydride methods, and the technicians who were endlessly charting, testing, studying—and finding fresh mysteries always beyond. And this latest test—a completely new type of atomic blast, one that had never existed before on earth, except, perhaps, so long ago that the planet was a white-hot, molten mass.

Briefly, the holocaust had blazed out and vanished. But it had left traces in the instruments planted in the path of the fury, and it had left its trace, too, in an intricate, sensitive instrument cage inside Daniel Gresham’s skull.

Thoughts can be measured; they are electric energy. The machine that transmits them can be functionally altered. And, adrift on his raft, Gresham had found a very strange substitute for his lost vision....

The Albacore’s boat came back with recording instruments from a floating buoy, and Black paced slowly up and down the deck, studying a coil of paper and trying to 

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