moment's eerie feeling that he heard with his brain instead of his ears.

"Wonderful, Fallon, wonderful! You see how circumstance makes us traitors to ourselves? But there is no need for heroics. You can turn back, Fallon."

The lines of Bjarnsson's body were quite gone. He loomed against the darkness as a pillar of shining mist. Fallon's weary eyes were dazzled with it.

"No," he muttered stubbornly. "No."

Bjarnsson's voice rolled in on him suddenly, soul-shaking as an organ.

Voice—or mind? A magnificent, thundering strength.

"This is evolution, Fallon. So shall we be, a million million years from now. This is living, Fallon. It is godhood! Take off your suit, Fallon! Grow with me!"

"Joan," said Fallon wearily. "Joan, dearest."

Cosmic laughter, shuddering in his mind. And then,

"Turn back, Fallon. In an hour it will be too late."

The shining mist was dimming, drawing in upon itself. And at the core, a tiny light was growing, a frosty white flame that seared Fallon's brain.

"Turn back! Turn back!"

He fought, silently. But the light and the voice poured into him. Abruptly, something in him relaxed. He'd been so long without rest.

He knew, very dimly, that he turned and changed the course, back toward the coast of California.

From somewhere, out of the gulfs between the stars, a voice spoke to him as he lay sprawled across the control panel.

"There was no need for you to die, Fallon. Now, I can see much. It was no monster that struck us, but the first shock of a series of quakes, which will close the fissure far better than any human agency. Therefore, what happened to me was not your fault.

"And I am glad it happened. I, Bjarnsson, was growing old, I had nothing but science to hold me to Earth. Now my knowledge is boundless, and I am not confined by the fetters of the flesh. I am Mind—as some day we will all be.

"You will be safe, Fallon. The invasion will fail as the 

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