"Go ahead," I murmured.

"Go ahead," I murmured from the table, for pride had made me conquer my terror.

All consciousness of bodily sensation vanished in a whirling blur as the jolts of current came faster and faster. I had a ghastly sensation of freedom.

Can freedom be terrible? Freedom from your own body can—at least at first. That was what I was feeling.

I seemed to float in a whirling, throbbing haze. Then my strange sensations cleared a little.

I was still in the laboratory. But now I was floating several feet above the table and the limp body of Fred Ellis!

I couldn't see, or hear, or use any other ordinary bodily sense. Yet I felt my surroundings as clearly as though I saw them, by means of unguessable senses in my immaterial being.

I was still I, but somehow it was now a different "I." I felt connected to the limp form of Fred Ellis below me only by a tenuous thread.

Dazed, bewildered by the change, as I hovered there I sensed a sudden clear question from close by.

"Has your host died, comrade?"

I didn't hear that, and it wasn't in words. It was in thought or thought-force that I automatically received.

In the same way, I was conscious now of another immaterial being like myself hovering close to me. He couldn't be seen, any more than I could, but he was there. And he was completely free, not connected as I was to a lax human body.

"Has your host died?" he asked again.

Dazedly, without realizing what I said, I answered in thought.

"No, he is not dead. I am still linked to him."

"Have you been here long, comrade?" came the question. "I am Klon, and I am newly-come from Aarl."

Aarl? That name was like a trigger in my hovering mind, unloosing a strange dim flood of memory.

"I am T'Shal, and I came from Aarl ages ago," I exclaimed. "Only now do I remember! There is horror here—"

Crash!

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