not know the origin of the Other. I may have lived in either
your future or your past. This valley, with its ruined stone
structures, is probably part of your future. I had never heard of such
a place before. The Other may be of the future also. Its shape I do
not know...."

* * * * *

She told me more, much more. The Other, as she called it--giving the
entity a thought-form that implied complete alienage--had a strangely
chameleon-like method of feeding. It lived on life-force, as well as I
could understand, draining the vital powers of a mammal vampirically.
And it assumed the shape of its prey as it fed. It was not possession,
in the strict sense of the word. It was a sort of merging....

Humanity is inclined to invest all things with its own attributes,
forgetting that outside the limitations of time and space and size,
familiar laws of nature do not apply.

So, even now I do not know all that lay behind the terror in that
Peruvian valley. This much I learned: the Other, like Lhar and her
robot, had been cast adrift by a time-slip, and thus marooned here.
There was no way for it to return to its normal Time-sector. It had
created the fog-wall to protect itself from the direct rays of the
sun, which threatened its existence.

Sitting there in the filigreed, silver twilight beside Lhar, I had a
concept of teeming universes of space-time, of an immense spiral of
lives and civilizations, races and cultures, covering an infinite
cosmos. And yet--what had happened? Very little, in that inconceivable
infinity. A rift in time, a dimensional slip--and a sector of land and
three beings on it had been wrenched from their place in time and
transported to _our_ time-stratum.

A robot, a flower that was alive and intelligent--and feminine--and
the Other....

"The native girls," I said. "What will happen to them?"

"They are no longer alive," Lhar told me. "They still move and
breathe, but they are dead, sustained only by the life-force of the
Other. I do not think it will harm me. Apparently it prefers other
food."

"That's why you've stayed here?" I asked.

The shining velvety calyx swayed. "I shall die soon. For a little
while I thought that I might manage to survive in this alien world,
this alien time. Your blood has helped." The cool tentacle withdrew
from my arm. "But I lived in a younger time, where space was filled
with--with certain energizing vibratory principles.

"They hav