rred to him, _he was helpless to do anything that he
wouldn't normally have done_.

Pondering that discovery, after he had cleaned his utensils and
finished his other chores, Herman crawled into his tent and went to
sleep.

Burying the garbage had been an unsettling experience. Like a lunatic
building a machine nobody else can see, he had lifted successive
shovels-full of nothing, dropped the empty cans and rubbish ten inches
into nothing, and shoveled nothing carefully over them again....

* * * * *

The light woke him, long before dawn. From where he lay on his back,
he could see an incredible pale radiance streaming upward all around
him, outlining the shadow of his body at the ridge of the tent,
picking out the under-surfaces of the trees against the night sky. He
strained, until he was weak and dizzy, to roll over so that he could
see its source; but he had to give up and wait another ten minutes
until his body turned "naturally," just as if he had still been
asleep.

Then he was looking straight down into a milky transparency that
started under his nose and continued into unguessable depths. First
came the matted clumps of grass, black against the light, every blade
and root as clear as if they had been set in transparent plastic. Then
longer, writhing roots of trees and shrubs, sprouting thickets of
hair-thin rootlets. Between these, and continuing downward level by
level, was spread an infinity of tiny specks, seed-shapes, spores.
Some of them moved, Herman realized with a shock. Insects burrowing
in the emptiness where the Earth should be?

In the morning, when he crawled out of the tent and went to the
bottomless stream to wash, he noticed something he had missed the day
before. The network of grasses gave springily under his feet--not like
turf, but like stretched rubber. Herman conceived an instant dislike
for walking, especially when he had to cross bare ground, because when
that happened, he felt exactly what he saw: nothing whatever
underfoot. "Walking on air," he realized, was not as pleasant an
experience as the popular songs would lead you to expect.

Herman shaved, cooked and ate breakfast, washed the dishes, did the
chores, and packed up his belongings. With a mighty effort, he pried
out the tent stakes, which were bedded in nothing but a loose network
of roots. He shouldered the load and carried it a quarter of a mile
through pine woods to his car.

The car