tire end of existence. Anderson slumped lower and lower.
Each time he blinked his lids opened a fraction less, while the time his
eyes stayed closed became a fraction of a second longer. The cabin
waited as tensely as the taut pose of the rigid little victory trophy.

Then there was the music.

It was soft, grand music; the music of pageantry, cloth-of-gold and
scarlet vestments; pendant jewels and multicolored dimness shouldering
upward to be lost in vaulted stone. It was music which awaited the
accompaniment of whispers, thousands of awed, ritualistic sibilants
which would carry no knowable meaning and only one avowed purpose. Soft
music, soft, soft; not soft as to volume, for the volume grew and grew,
but soft with the softness of clouds which are soft for all their
mountain-size and brilliance; soft and living as a tiger's throat, soft
as a breast, soft as the act of drowning, and huge as a cloud.

Anderson made two moves: he raised his head, and he spun the beer in his
mug so its center surface sank and the bubbles whirled. With his head up
and his eyes down he sat watching the bubbles circle and slow.

Paresi rose slowly and went to the center of the small lighted space
left to them, and slowly he knelt. His arms came up and out, and his
upturned face was twisted and radiant.

Before him in the blackness there was--or perhaps there had been for
some time--a blue glow, almost as lightless as the surrounding dark, but
blue and physically deep for all that. Its depth increased rather than
its light. It became the ghost of a grotto, the mouth of a nameless
Place.

And in it was a person. A ... _presence_. It beckoned.

Paresi's face gleamed wetly. "Me?" he breathed. "You want--me?"

It beckoned.

"I--don't believe you," said Paresi. "You can't want me. You don't know
who I am. You don't know what I am, what I've done. You don't want
me...." His voice quavered almost to inaudibility. "... do you?"

It beckoned.

"Then you know," sang Paresi in the voice of revelation. "I have denied
you with my lips, but you know, you know, you know that underneath ...
deep down ... I have not wavered for an instant. I have kept your image
before me."

He rose. Now Anderson watched him.

"You are my life," said Paresi, "my hopes, my fulfillment. You are all
wisdom and all charity. Thank you, thank you ... Master. I give thee
thanks oh Lord," he blurted, and walked straight into the blue glow.

There was an instant when