ame back to Earth.
They're alive and they're dead."

Martha's face was a mask of confusion. She was trying to understand and
not knowing how. Ren saw this and tried again.

"Suppose we try from this angle," he said patiently. "If a car is going
ten miles an hour it will be ten miles farther on at the end of an hour.
If it goes twenty miles an hour it will be twenty miles farther on. But
suppose it goes both ten miles an hour and twenty miles an hour. At the
end of an hour it will be ten miles and twenty miles along, and
according to what the Earth is used to it would have to become two cars
to do that.

"If it went every speed from zero to twenty miles an hour it would have
to become an infinite number of cars, and occupy every position from the
starting point to a twenty-mile distance at the end of an hour. That
would be the conventional conclusion to the abstract problems. With the
new basics it does just that--except that it is still just one car, and
yet never was just one car and never will be. It CAN'T be, because there
is no such thing, in the new system, as a one thing.

"I myself am not Ren Gravenard, only Ren Gravenard, or anything else
that your old ideas can conceive of. You'll see, Martha. The whole world
will see soon, just as I did after we had been on Metapor a short while
and had gotten the contradictions out of my mind and my structure."

"Then what are you?" Martha asked tensely.

"I'm the crew of the _Endore_," Ren said softly. "I'm Ren Gravenard here
and now because that is the only thing you can accept at present.
I'm--Her, the incomprehensible."

A question rose in Martha's mind. She drew back from the question as
from the brink of the Abyss, yet felt drawn magnetically toward it. Ren
watched and knew what that question would be. She opened her lips.

"Who--am I?" she asked.

"Look at your hands," Ren said.

Martha looked down at her hands resting on the edge of the table. They
were large, gnarled, strong--the hands of a man. She flexed them. They
were smooth and skillful.

Wonderingly she raised her eyes to look at her companion across the
table. Her companion was--herself and she was Ren Gravenard. Anything
else would have been--unthinkable.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In 2027 A.D., just seventy-five years after the first space flight,
a dangerous disease was brought to Earth which wiped out almost a
million lives before a cure was found. Immediately an elaborate
quarantine