ade no
mistake. This was no other self of mine. This was no experience that
had once been mine. I was aware all the time that it was I, Darrell
Standing, who walked among the stars and tapped them with a wand of
glass. In short, I knew that here was nothing real, nothing that had
ever been nor could ever be. I knew that it was nothing else than a
ridiculous orgy of the imagination, such as men enjoy in drug dreams, in
delirium, or in mere ordinary slumber.

And then, as all went merry and well with me on my celestial quest, the
tip of my wand missed a star, and on the instant I knew I had been guilty
of a great crime. And on the instant a knock, vast and compulsive,
inexorable and mandatory as the stamp of the iron hoof of doom, smote me
and reverberated across the universe. The whole sidereal system
coruscated, reeled and fell in flame.

I was torn by an exquisite and disruptive agony. And on the instant I
was Darrell Standing, the life-convict, lying in his strait-jacket in
solitary. And I knew the immediate cause of that summons. It was a rap
of the knuckle by Ed Morrell, in Cell Five, beginning the spelling of
some message.

And now, to give some comprehension of the extension of time and space
that I was experiencing. Many days afterwards I asked Morrell what he
had tried to convey to me. It was a simple message, namely: "Standing,
are you there?" He had tapped it rapidly, while the guard was at the far
end of the corridor into which the solitary cells opened. As I say, he
had tapped the message very rapidly. And now behold! Between the first
tap and the second I was off and away among the stars, clad in fleecy
garments, touching each star as I passed in my pursuit of the formulae
that would explain the last mystery of life. And, as before, I pursued
the quest for centuries. Then came the summons, the stamp of the hoof of
doom, the exquisite disruptive agony, and again I was back in my cell in
San Quentin. It was the second tap of Ed Morrell's knuckle. The
interval between it and the first tap could have been no more than a
fifth of a second. And yet, so unthinkably enormous was the extension of
time to me, that in the course of that fifth of a second I had been away
star-roving for long ages.

Now I know, my reader, that the foregoing seems all a farrago. I agree
with you. It is farrago. It was experience, however. It was just as
real to me as is the snake beheld by a man in delirium t