thing moving in the ravine below him, sunlight on brown,
bare skin.

He waited until he caught another glimpse through the trees. As he had
suspected it was Louie, still trying to keep him always in sight.

His first impulse was to call out, to wait for Louie, ask him to join in
the climb. He discarded the impulse. His need was to get away from all
others. And sympathetic and compassionate though he might be, the
confusion in Louie's mind seemed to intrude upon his own. Nor had his
earlier attempts to comfort Louie met success.

Let Louie follow if he willed. Perhaps the clean air would clear his
mind as well. He feared no physical harm, even if Louie's tortured mind
intended it. There were no tools to strike at him from a distance. Even
a boulder pushed from a height above him would not strike, for that
would be the physical use of a tool to gain an end. He feared no bodily
attack from ambush, for his own strength and knowledge were dependable.

He began his climb again, followed the crest of the ridge where it swept
upward to buttress the side of the mountain. The going was not
difficult. The trees and shrubs grew thinner here, and provided clear
spaces for him to wind among them. The stones, at first a problem to his
bare feet, bothered him less and less until he forgot them. He felt no
physical discomfort, neither from tiredness nor thirst, nor from the
branches scraping his bare skin, nor anything to drag his mind into
trivialities.

Nor tortured theories such as had plagued him in trying to reason out
the new concepts of a proportionate, variable reality.

Instead, there was a sense of well being, anticipated completeness, a
merging of the often quite separated areas of thought, intuition, and
appreciation.

Although at no great height, now the trees no longer grew so tall that
they obscured his vision of the heights above. As he climbed they were
replaced by shrubs shoulder high, then waist high, then merely low,
creeping growths which his feet avoided without mental direction.

A curve of the ridge brought him to the first outcroppings of
crystallized quartz. On them he saw no signs of scar left by the
geologist's hammer, no imperfections where nodes may have been broken
away. They were complete, singularly unweathered.

There was no path, nor hint of one, nor sign that either scientist or
colonist had ever passed this way.

The ridge swung back into line, and still he climbed, effortlessly and
witho