sea has
been determined and arranged by the artists."

"But why?" I said. "Wasn't it a frightful waste of energy?"

"It didn't seem so to us," she answered. "We had no further need to
cultivate the land except in small patches, when we learned the secret
of artificial food. And we wanted to have perfect beauty about us. So we
remodeled the outlines of the earth, and eliminated the insects and the
harmful animals and the weeds. We made the land clean and fine as it had
never been before."

"It must have been a terrific labor."

"It pleased us. Our instinct is to arrange and remodel things, to order
our life so that we know what it is and what it will always be." She
paused for a moment, and added in a low voice, "One is necessarily a
determinist here."

We said no more until our arrival in Richmond.

It is not my purpose to detail here all that happened during the time I
spent on that world. Most of it had to do with Selda, and our daily
expeditions about the world. This is not, after all, a love story, but
the account of a very strange experience; and, too, none of it was real.

During my last week, a series of strange moods and happenings
complicated my life. One day, after a visit to the sea with Selda, we
were walking back to our plane across the sand. Without any warning,
surrounded by the brilliant morning sunlight and the miles of sea and
beach, I struck my knee against something hard and immovable, and,
flinging out my hand to catch myself from falling, I clung to a hard
surface like an iron railing. For a moment I was stunned and confused.
The sunlight seemed to fade, and there was a vague hint of darkness all
about me, with black walls looming up on all sides. It was as though I
stood in two worlds at once, transfixed between night and day. Then the
darkness went away, the sunlight brightened. I looked around, and found
Selda watching me curiously, a little alarmed.

"What happened, Baret?" she asked, puzzled. I shook my head in
bewilderment.

"I seemed to stumble--" I said. There was nothing underfoot but the soft
sand, and where I had flung my hand against a sort of railing, there was
nothing either. We went back to the airship in silence, both of us
confused.

* * * * *

After that, with increasing frequency, there would come interruptions,
like iron bars striking dark, jagged holes in the tissue of life. From
time to time I heard inexplicable noises--the whirring