He did not hurry.
He came to the thirty-fifth band, where unattached colors of violent hue did their spasmic dances through matterless space.
... Youth. There is still time, not for this, but for that other!
The forty-first. The forty-sixth. He made his leisurely transit into the forty-seventh. And then there was chaos. A jumble, a mumble of burning thoughts that turned him into something he had no mind to recognize. He was chaos.
Recognition again. Wave upon wave of horror rolled over him. Condensing energy rained from his outer to his inner body. For he knew what he had tried to do—tried, again and again, and, time after time, had failed to do: to enter the forty-eighth band.
In his chaos, he had hurled himself at that unseen wall, and time after time, it had hurled him back. He could not enter.
Thought came slowly. He was numbed with the attack of the monster inside him. Fleetingly, knowledge came. But it was gone before he could snatch it. Then he blundered like a blinded creature down the bands.
He knew what he must do, what he could not deny.
He left that galaxy, plunged across the winding arteries where dark flowed, was in the galaxy of his birth. And at last, alone in space, he faced her.