ancient processes and worn by a human being.

Without explanation, Oktav rose and moved toward the inner doorway. His hand fumbled again in his robe, but it was merely an idle repetition of the earlier gesture. In the last glimpse he had of his face, Clawly saw continued consternation, frantic memory-searching, and the frozen intentness of a competent mind scanning every possible avenue of escape from a deadly trap.

Oktav went through the doorway.

There was no sound.

Clawly waited.

Time spun on. Clawly shifted his position, caught himself, coughed, waited, coughed again, got up, moved toward the inner doorway, came back and sat down.

There was time, too much time. Time to think again and again of that odd superstition about fleeting appearances of men in Dawn-Civilization garb. Time to make a thousand nightmarish deductions from the age in Oktav's, and that other's, eyes.

Finally he got up and walked to the inner doorway.

There was a tiny unfurnished room, without windows or another door, the typical secondary compartment of offices like this. Its walls were bare and seamless.

There was no one.

V.

... and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses had told of the presence of consciousness and will.

The Haunter of the Dark, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

With a sickening ultimate plunge, that seemed to plumb in instants distances greater than the diameter of the cosmos—a plunge in which more than flesh and bones were stripped away, transformed—Oktav followed his summoner into a region of not only visual night.

Here in the Zone, outside the bubble of space-time, on the borders of eternity, even the atoms were still. Only thought moved—but thought powered beyond description or belief, thought that could make or mar universes, thought not unbefitting gods.

Most strange, then, to realize that it was human thought, with all its homely biases and 

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