As she would destroy me!
The thought raged, but he prepared.
Then hiatus ... the gulf of timelessness between two instants of time. There was a click deep in the subterranean caverns of his thought swirls. It was as if he had been transported to another band of hyper-space.
But was this another hyper-space? It could not be. In that depthless ladder of universes, and he had traversed them all, there was nothing similar.
He viewed this strange space with childish wonder, knowing that he was here, yet without a body, without a purple central light.
And he knew, too, that actually he was in the forty-eighth band of hyper-space, about to die, and at peace.
He was there—and here. Fantasy or reality? It did not matter. It came to him, in wonder as gentle as light scattering, that here there was a mystery he might never comprehend.
A queer, geometric, somehow logical universe. Yes, the idea of logic pressed insistently in on him. And yet, what happened did not seem logical. For all of these clean-cut star-systems, though vast distances stretched between them, seemed equally large to his sight. There was a feeling of distance—without perspective.
Between those star-systems were no dust-motes, no hurrying comets, no uncollected suns, no irregularity. There was dark, logical vacuum.
But suns, sometimes whole groups of suns, whirled sparkling across that vacuum from one spinning galaxy to another. That galaxy, in turn, urged another unit from its turning heart, or majestically rounded rim. The quiet, orderly exchange was magnificent to watch. The exchanged suns, or solar systems, quietly fell into new orbits that seemed prepared for them.