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Despite their nus he watched so briefly appeared to be urgently busy Even the motionless ones seeitations There was an omnipresent sense of crisis

Occasionally, as if by a failure of flight pattern, or perhaps for relief, Don would pause in a roo up withwith fluids of etation sunlit by laent plants; rooe of life, like those on the Wanderer&039;s surface; spherical rooh it neither burned nor blinded hi done by artificial-seeiant aans varied with the task being perfor spiders, wheel-beings, and h soe structures like gigantic electronic brains Their transparent walls showed dark jellies glinting with tangled silvery lines finer than hairs, as if they grew nerves and thought-cells as needed

The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence Nohen he paused in the star-specked central globe, it see shape and multi-armed: cold creatures of the darkness beyond the stars And once when he soared briefly to the upper deck, he glig and spill out a horde of beings

Yet the ent life, the more he was racked by the conviction that there were all around hi - as if the Wanderer had hosts aboard than all her crew members

He paused in a profoundly still room of many balconies and almost an infinitude of cases of tiny drawers, like the card catalogue room of a library Fila instrureatthe ht that here servilefor inspection e of races and the histories of worlds All Earth&039;s thought and culture, he told himself, would easily fit into just one of the tiny drawers It was al viewpoint of eternity which is sometimes called God

From that room he flashed into a busier one croith command tables,On and in the latter were ever-changing scenes of catastrophe: landscapes and cities riven by earthquake, seared by fire, inundated by great waves and silent rises of water He peered excitedly for a while, then it came to hi tidal rip of the Wanderer&039;s ravity on and off as suited its purposes

He wanted to stay and watch, or thought he did, but instead he was irresistibly hurried off through several walls into a cha tank with alien faces all around it, soht In the tank hungquarter-ring that was the re close to the two planets, were points of violet and yellow light which he guessed were spaceships

The larger globes were the right distance apart - some thirty times their diameter - and Don could not tell whether they were replicas or three-diood that he felt he was drifting in space, with the weird alien faces replacing the constellations

Then without warning other planets, green, gray, gold, soan to appear by ones and twos Bright bolts of light that traveled with a curious slowness shot between the 186,000 miles a second, but slowed down to scale There werefleets Then all the planets but Earth began toin a battle

But he never saw the outcoh, the Wanderer began to work on hi the end of his trip For the first ti of weariness

The next three roorounds velvet black except for the alien faces of the viewers The first showed a swirled lens of bright points and clusters of light - a galaxy, certainly, probably the Milky Way

The second rooreat swarht spaced rather e about the space in this tank - it seemed to curve back upon itself ed uessed he was seeing the entire cosination began to wander sleepily, independently of his viewing Phrases drifted through his mind: This artificial planetthe umbilicus of the cosmosthe central brainthe eternal eyethe book of the pastthe woote of the futuretranscendent as God, yet not God

He returned to hi viewpoint, with a start, to realize that he was gazing into a great black viewing tank in which the cosnizable by its mysteriously twisted shape - was only one sht-puffs of other shapes and hues began to appear and vanish, so a while Don wondered dreas of the Wanderer Or perhaps only universes guessed atsoughtthere was sohostliness and their swift vanishingand stars and galaxies and universes are truly such unreal things, no ht that swim before one&039;s eyes before one sleeps

Then the one bright cosan to dip and dart about like a leaf in a ind, and he worried dreamily why that should be, since surely the universe is firan to swirl too, hypothetically

The last rooht h his weary e, worldlike room, si above a veldt dotted with rocks and tree clumps Small hoofed anile slirazed fastidiously Birds with ruby and topaz and ee and with elaborate corass and the tree clumps as if in search of seeds and fruit

Suddenly three birds whirred up at once froly still, sniffing the air and peering about fearfully, then took off with great bounds Siray-barred tan felinoid otherwise rese Don&039;s conductor He raced after the unicorns, his long legs flashing, hurled hirasped it by chest and chin, and dipped his jaard its throat

A topaz bird winged past the nearest tree-clureen-furred felinoid, fehtly different contours She leaped with the soaring grace and alrand jet�� Her long ar talons deeply pricked its breast Grasping it by the comb with her other hand, she carried it to her lips and bit expertly into its ruffling neck

There was a redness on her dull olive lips and on the one long white fang showing as she looked across the yellow feathers straight at Don with her large and flowerlike, jade-irised eyes It may have been coincidence, but he felt that she saw him And as she sucked the blood, with the blood-red sky behind her, she srew di once more in his tiny cabin He tried to look down at the bed, but was again unable to The next instant he was lying on it He felt its soothing touch fro, swooping yrated down to darkness and to rest