ed back in the thundering silence of
Death's approach. "They were always saying I was bad."

_They._

* * * * *

Collins got a picture of something incredibly old and incredibly wise,
but long unused to the young, clumsy gods. Something that could mar the
molding of a godling and make it mortal.

"But I'm not really so very bad," Doc Candle went on. "I had to
destroy, but I picked someone who really didn't care if he were
destroyed or not. An almost absolutely passive human being, Sam. You."

Collins nodded.

"And even then," said the superhuman alien from outer space, "I could
not just destroy. I have created a work of art."

"Work of art?"

"Yes. I have taken your life and turned it into a horror story, Sam! A
chilling, demonic, black-hearted horror!"

Collins nodded again.

_LIGHTSPEED._

There was finally something human within Sam Collins that he could not
deny. He wanted to live. It wasn't true. He did care what happened.

You do? said somebody.

He does? asked somebody else, surprised, and suddenly he again got the
image of wiser, older creatures, a little ashamed because of what they
had done to the creature named Doc Candle.

He does, chorused several voices, and Sam Collins cried aloud: "I do! I
want to live!" They were just touching lightspeed; he felt it.

This time it was not just a biological response. He really wanted help.
He wanted to stay alive.

From the older, wiser voices he got help, though he never knew how; he
felt the ship move slipwise under him, and then a crash.

And Doc Candle got help too, the only help even the older, wiser ones
could give him.

* * * * *

They pulled him out of the combined wreckage of the spaceship and his
house. Both were demolished.

It was strange how the spaceship Sam Collins was on crashed right into
his house. Ed Michaels recalled a time in a tornado when Sy Baxter's car
was picked up, lifted across town and dropped into his living room.

When the men from the spaceport lifted away tons of rubble, they found
him and said, "He's dead."

No, I'm not, Collins thought. I'm alive.

And then they saw that he really was alive, that he had come through it
alive somehow, and nobody remembered anything like it since the airliner
crash in '59.

A while later, after they found Doc Candle's body and court-martialed
Smith-Boerke, who took drugs, Nancy was nuzzlin