He dazedly headed for one of the bluish glows. It faintly outlined scrawny trees and rubbish-littered ground between him and it.

He was conscious of something strange about his body. Through the twinges and numbness caused by his fall, it obtruded itself—a feeling of pervasive ill-health and at the same time a sense of light, lean toughness of muscular fiber—both disturbingly unfamiliar.

He picked his way through the last of the rubbish and came out at the top of a terrace. The bluish glow was very strong now. It came from the nearest of a line of illuminators set on poles along a broad avenue at the foot of the terrace. A crowd of people were moving along the avenue, but a straggly hedge obscured his view.

He started down, then hesitated. The tangly stuff was still clinging to him. He automatically started to brush it off, and noted that it consisted of thin, springy spirals of plastic and metal—identical with the shavings from an old-style, presubtronic hyperlathe. Presumably a huge heap of the stuff had been vented from the funnel-mouths he had passed in his fall. Though it bewildered him to think how many hyperlathes must be in the dark building he was skirting, to produce so much scrap. Hyperlathes were obsolete, almost a curiosity. And to gather so many engines of any sort into one building was unthought of.

His mind was jarred off this problem by sight of his hands and clothing. They seemed strange—the former pallid, thin, heavy-jointed, almost clawlike.

Sharp but far away, as if viewed through a reducing glass, came memories of the evening's events. Clawly, the symchromy, the old man in black, the conference in the Sky Room, his plunge through the forest.

There was something clenched in his left hand—so tightly that the fingers opened with difficulty. It was the small gray sphere he had stolen at the Yggdrasil. He looked at it disturbedly. Surely, if he still had that thing with him, it meant that he couldn't have changed. And yet—

His mind filled with a formless but mounting foreboding.

Under the compulsion of that foreboding, he thrust the sphere into his pocket—a pocket that wasn't quite where it should be and that contained a metallic cylinder of unfamiliar feel. Then he ran down the terrace, pushed through the straggly hedge, and joined the crowd surging along the blue-litten avenue.

The foreboding became a 

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