with a
younger one. If he went in pursuit he would find her ultimately--that
was in the nature of being older and wiser--but, if she revolted against
his pursuit, she could extend the time considerably on this forsaken
planet. And he wanted to get her away as soon as possible.

The more time here the more chance that the awful truth would come to
her before her time.

He watched the growing waves of creatures floundering toward the vast
oozing puddle, which refilled itself as quickly as it was diminished by
them, and the receding waves of those that had already fed. This, he
could see, was an endless process. The whole life of the species moved
in continuous systole-diastole around the machine.

Soon he would have to go in search of her.

But then she was back at his side, her being for this world once more
solidified. She concentrated for a moment on the pink-striped waves of
rippling inward and outward around the great sustaining pool, then
communicated with him.

"We can leave now. There is nothing more to see."

Something in her mind remained closed to his, as the mind of younger
never should be to older. But at least he could see with relief that the
worst had not happened. The deeper knowledge had not arrived to her too
early when it could only hurt. All he found turned to him--as they
receded from this thin-manifold universe, then moved up the dimension
ladder to their home level--was a surface of happiness.

Suddenly, though, as they prepared for flight in that hyperspace all her
joy was gone.

"I saw it," she said. "In my free and unrestricted spirit I moved deep
into the substance of that world, below all the total ruin, far below.
And there was a monstrous machine, near the molten core, almost
infinitely older than the feeding one far above it. And it, too, had
been left in a stratum where all else was destroyed. I could see it had
once produced the ooze from which came the life from which in turn come
the beings by whom the machine above it was made. Maybe they, too,
thought they were free and unrestricted!"

He sighed for the bitter cost of knowledge.

This one would no longer go forth in the joy of mere exploration, and he
would no longer live vicariously in the happiness of another being's
innocence. Now Harta, too, would be seeking the answer to the question
of original creation, the answer that he had not found in his journeys
across a myriad worlds and dimensions....

That no one had eve