ed. He'd assumed that the sun of this world must be
above the sky, but he'd been wrong; like the other heavenly bodies, it
had been embedded inside the shell. He had discovered that the sky
material resisted any sudden stroke, but that other matter could be
interpenetrated into it, as the stars were. He had even been able to
pass his hand and arm completely through the sample. Apparently the sun
had passed through the sky in a similar manner.

Then why hadn't the shell melted? He had no real answer. The sun must
have been moving fast enough so that no single spot became too hot, or
else the phlogiston layer somehow dissipated the heat.

The cloud of glowing stuff from the rising air column was spreading out
now, reflecting the light and heat back to the earth. There was a chance
that most of one hemisphere might retain some measure of warmth, then.
At least there was still light enough for him to travel safely.

By the time he was too tired to go on again, he had come to the
beginnings of fertile land. He passed a village, but it had been looted,
and he skirted around it rather than stare at the ghastly ghoul-work of
the looters. The world was ending, but civilization seemed to have ended
already. Beyond it, he came to a rude house, now abandoned. He staggered
in gratefully.

For a change, he had one piece of good luck. His first attempt at magic
produced food. At the sound of the snapping fingers and his
hoarse-voiced "abracadabra," a dirty pot of hot and greasy stew came
into existence. He had no cutlery, but his hands served well enough.
When it was gone, he felt better. He wiped his hands on the
breechclout. Whatever the material in the cloth, it had stood the sun's
heat almost as well as he had.

Then he paused as his hand found a lump under the cloth. He drew out the
apprentice magician's book. The poor devil had never achieved his twenty
lifetimes, and this was probably all that was left of him. Hanson stared
at it, reading the title in some surprise.

_Applied Semantics._

He propped himself up and began to scan it, wondering what it had to do
with magic. He'd had a course of semantics in college and could see no
relationship. But he soon found that there were differences.

This book began with the axiomatic statement that the symbol is the
thing. From that it developed in great detail the fact that any part of
a whole bearing similarity to the whole was also the whole; that each
seven was the class of