fantasy it was, of course, yet built I know around
a nucleus of strange truth. It was"--his tone was half whimsical,
half apologetic--"it was that this jeweled world was ridden by some
mathematical god, driving it through space, noting occasionally with
amused tolerance the very bad arithmetic of another Deity the reverse
of mathematical--a more or less haphazard Deity, the god, in fact, of us
and the things we call living.

"It had no mission; it wasn't at all out to do any reforming; it wasn't
in the least concerned in rectifying any of the inaccuracies of the
Other. Only now and then it took note of the deplorable differences
between the worlds it saw and its own impeccably ordered and tidy temple
with its equally tidy servitors.

"Just an itinerant demiurge of supergeometry riding along through space
on its perfectly summed-up world; master of all celestial mechanics;
its people independent of all that complex chemistry and labor for
equilibrium by which we live; needing neither air nor water, heeding
neither heat nor cold; fed with the magnetism of interstellar space and
stopping now and then to banquet off the energy of some great sun."

A thrill of amazement passed through me; fantasy all this might be
but--how, if so, had he gotten that last thought? He had not seen, as
we had, the orgy in the Hall of the Cones, the prodigious feeding of the
Metal Monster upon our sun.

"That passed," he went on, unnoticing. "I saw vast caverns filled with
the Things; working, growing, multiplying. In caverns of our Earth--the
fruit of some unguessed womb? I do not know.

"But in those caverns, under countless orbs of many colored
lights"--again the thrill of amaze shook me--"they grew. It came to me
that they were reaching out toward sunlight and the open. They burst
into it--into yellow, glowing sunlight. Ours? I do not know. And that
picture passed."

His voice deepened.

"There came a third vision. I saw our Earth--I knew, Goodwin,
indisputably, unmistakably that it was our earth. But its rolling
hills were leveled, its mountains were ground and shaped into cold and
polished symbols--geometric, fashioned.

"The seas were fettered, gleaming like immense jewels in patterned
settings of crystal shores. The very Polar ice was chiseled. On the
ordered plains were traced the hieroglyphs of the faceted world. And on
all Earth, Goodwin, there was no green life, no city, no trace of man.
On this Earth that had been ours wer