Well, if you can move into this beam, it will actuate the telegraph-sounder and signal us.

"Send us, if you're able, an exact description of just what you feel and remember. We'll take it down—and when you return to your body, it won't matter if you immediately do forget everything again."

He turned on the electroshock current, and I felt again that sharp tingle in body and brain.

Again, my senses blurred. The laboratory swam about me, I was whirling through dimness.

The pressure of the jolting current mounted and mounted. I felt an intolerable sense of strain—then a sharp, sudden release.

I was completely free of Fred Ellis' limp body now! I, T'Shal the Aarlan, who had inhabited Ellis' body for thirty Earth years!

"Comrade, is it you again?" I recognized instantly the mental voice of Klon, who had said he was newly-come from Aarl.

From Aarl? Memory began to rush over me, memory that was heartbreakingly vivid.

I remembered Aarl! I remembered our world of supernal beauty and splendor that lay far, far across the cosmos from this drab, heavy little world Earth.

Aarl, world not of solid matter but of free electrons, floating like a glorious sphere of light in the glare of a great white sun! Aarl, wondrous globe of ever-shifting color, light and beauty!

And I was an Aarlan! I was one of the race that had evolved there as individual, intelligent photon-groups—immaterial photon-beings living immortally in our radiant, ethereal world!

"Comrade, I sense your trouble of spirit!" came the cry of Klon. "What is wrong?"

"You have just come from Aarl, you say?" I cried. "You must go back there, back to Aarl before you are trapped on this world!"

"Are you mad, comrade?" he asked wonderingly. "Why should I leave when I have come to gather new experiences on this world?"

To gather new experiences? Yes, that was the passion of all us immortal Aarlans. For ages, beating our way out through the cosmos on streams of light, we had visited other worlds. We had entered the bodies of their material creatures and had lived there with them in peaceful symbiosis, garnering many rich new experiences.

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