dder. The others were in the companionway and they pressed back in
horror to let me pass. For the first time since we'd started, Keebler
was sober. Ashen, shaking, stone sober. He broke; screamed and ran for
his bottle, the world of reality too terrible for him to bear.

There was no huddle, no conference, no meeting of the minds. Everyone
else went to the galley and sat staring into space; stared at the
dancing little sparkles in the air.

I went to my cabin.

When confronted by a reality no matter how crazy and improbable, a man
must not turn from it. He can not carry the mangled body of a woman in
his arms and then say to himself: _This isn't real because it doesn't
make sense._ It _does_ make sense--some kind of sense or it would not
exist. A man must say rather: _I don't understand this and maybe I
never will but God gave me a brain and I must try. I can't sit back
and deny reality. I must try to understand it._ I cleared my mind and
tried to rationalize the things around us.

Out in the darkness there was a terrible roaring and yammering. The
thuds and bellows of violence. I went to the port.

There, in the light from the ship, the ice bear and the water buffalo
were fighting. It was a terrible and magnificent thing but to me it
was anticlimax; a sideshow of almost casual interest.

The ice bear outsized the water buff by too much to be in any danger,
but the buff fought savagely and the ice bear had no easy time. The
buff opened a long deep gash in the bear's throat when the bear missed
a lunge and the Plutonian mammal fell back with a roar of pain and
fury. They came together again and this time the bear got the buff in
a hug and it was all over. The buff's spine broke and the bear bent
the body double, then tore it to pieces. I wondered if the others were
watching.

I went back to pacing; back to my thinking.

I have been thinking, thinking, thinking; wracking my brain. And of
one thing I am sure. Some invisible intelligence is trying to help me;
trying to give me knowledge. The sparkling fog?

* * * * *

A great and wonderful thing has happened.

_And I know._ Do you realize what that means? To know in a situation
like this? And to be wonderfully and wildly happy? The knowledge was
not all given me. There was a thought process of my own developing.
The thing given me was the basic knowledge upon which to build. And
proof of this knowledge. Absolute and indisputable