ut consciousness of passing time. Time and space and matter seemed
to have receded far into the background of consciousness. Man's
star-strewn civilization was no more than a dream. It was as if he,
alone and complete, occupied the whole of the universe, encompassed it
as he was encompassed by it.

Yet not alone! Their presence, which seemed so evanescent on the valley
floor, was closer now, more clearly sensed. Almost as if, at any
instant, the veil of blindness would disperse and They would stand
revealed.

Now up the final slope of the mountain he threaded his way through
higher outcroppings of a more perfectly formed quartz, with deeper
amethystine hue scintillating in the Ceti sun's light, diffracted not
only in the purples but into greens and reds and blues.

As he came around the base of one of these, there towering above he
caught his first full view of the greater spires, pinnacles, buttresses,
and arches of the mountain's crest.

It was the crystal palace.

The climb had been steep, steeper than it had appeared from below, yet
his breathing was not labored, his mouth was not dry from thirst, nor
were his muscles protesting the effort. He did not need to stop and
rest, to gather his energy for the last steep assault upon the peak.

Far below him he saw Louie toiling up a slope, then dropping with every
appearance of exhaustion when he came to each level place. Still he
would rest no more than a minute, and always his head was turned to keep
sight of Cal above him. He would push himself to his knees, then to his
feet; and slowly, step by step, begin his climb again.

As if from far away, Cal felt a pity at the uselessness of the
self-torture, the senseless need of man to punish himself for the guilt
of imagined wrongs; and felt a wonder if the strangely developed moral
sense of man had not, after all, done more harm than good. For in the
ordered universe, where everything fitted into the whole, what could be
either good or bad, right or wrong, except as a reflection of man's
inadequacies in his imaginings? Rightness and good, wrongness and evil,
these could not possibly be other than assessments of furtherance or
threat to the ascendancy of me-and-mine at the center of things, and had
no meaning beyond that context.

He turned from watching Louie, pitying him, and made the last sharp
climb with no more effort than the whole had been. Now he drew near to
the towering structures of the crest, now he was b