death nor was it a dream from which he would awaken.
After that moment of mental agony and ghastly physical pain, after a
dizzying rush through inky nothingness, Bert knew suddenly that he was
very much alive. If he had lost consciousness at all, it had been for
no great length of time. And yet there was this sense of strangeness
in his surroundings, a feeling that he had been transported over some
nameless gulf of space. He had dropped to his knees, but with the
swift return of normal faculties he jumped to his feet.

A tall stranger confronted him, a half-nude giant with bronzed skin
and of solemn visage. The stalwart build of him and the smooth
contours of cheek and jaw proclaimed him a man not yet past middle
age, but his uncropped hair was white as the driven snow.

They stood in a spherical chamber of silvery metal, Bert and this
giant, and the gentle vibration of delicately balanced machinery made
itself felt in the structure. Of Joan and Tom there was no sign.

"Where am I?" Bert demanded. "And where are my friends? Why am I with
you, without them?"

Compassion was in the tall stranger's gaze--and something more. The
pain of a great sorrow filled the brown eyes that looked down at Bert,
and resignation to a fate that was shrouded in ineffable mystery.

"Trust me," he said in a mellow slurring voice. "Where you are, you
shall soon learn. You are safe. And your friends will be located."

"_Will_ be located! Don't you _know_ where they are?" Bert laid hands
on the big man's wrists and shook him impatiently. The stranger was
too calm and unmoved in the face of this tremendous thing which had
come to pass.

"I know where they have been taken, yes. But there is no need of haste
out here in infra-dimensional space, for time stands still. We will
find it a simple matter to reach the plane of their captors, the
Bardeks, within a few seconds after your friends arrive there. My
plane segregator--this sphere--will accomplish this in due season."

* * * * *

Strangely, Bert believed him. This talk of dimensions and planes and
of the halting of time was incomprehensible, but somehow there was
communicated to his own restless nature something of the placid
serenity of the white-haired stranger. He regarded the man more
closely, saw there was an alien look about him that marked him as
different and apart from the men of Earth. His sole garment was a wide
breech clout of silvery stuff th