e end of his cigarette off the
edge of the table onto the floor. Martha's eyes took this in and slowly
lost their faraway look.

"I'm trying to make clear, Martha," Ren said gravely, "the emergence
into consciousness of the things going on around us. There was no way
yet for us to suspect their full activity--their inroads. Things were
going on that we simply could not see or sense in any way because we
didn't yet have the faculty of grasping them. They made their impression
and were lost in a hodge-podge of neural channels already deeply grooved
in the normal way, so that when they got close enough to the conscious
mind to be sensed, they were distorted beyond any semblance of the true
reality."

"I can see that," Martha said, her eyes brooding. "But DID you find a
living, intelligent creature or race on Metapor?"

Ren nodded. "I'm coming to that later," he said. "Be patient and let me
take things in order. That's the only way you can understand when I tell
you about--her."

His eyes studied the glowing coal at the end of the cigarette. He lifted
the white cylinder to his lips and sucked in. Dropping the cigarette on
the floor and stepping on it, he let the grey smoke seep from his mouth
and nostrils.

Traffic sounds came through the window. A murmur of voices drifted over
the two as they sat there, quietly.

"I've tried to bring you up to the point where I began to suspect," Ren
continued. "I described the feeling I had that was something like
watching a large chunk of the bank of a stream break away, starting
first as a jagged crack in the turf, with it widening slowly at first,
then faster, until the broken chunk becomes a separate THING,
dissociated from the bank. It breaks away, drops into the stream--and
vanishes; while the bank itself remains, enclosing and containing the
rushing stream.

"I didn't realize then what that feeling meant. I had felt it in varied
shades before. It rose almost into consciousness, then, like the broken
section of the bank itself, it would drop away and dissolve in the
swirling stream of mind.

"Sitting there at the table in the ship's dining room, suddenly I
suspected what that feeling really sprung from. I got my first inkling
of what intervalness instead of numberness really meant.

"For an insane period I was two people, both the same person and yet not
a person--and even not two, or even one, but a 'something' that
_contained_ in the logical sense all of those, as a cl