Wind keened thinly over the empty deserts and the ruins, kicked up little puffs of sand that raced and danced weird rigadoons across the dunes and past the ship, up to the very doors of the shiny building that confronted them.
A slinking shape slunk across a dune and streaked swiftly for the shelter of a pile of fallen masonry — a little furtive shape that might have been a skulking dog or something else, almost anything at all.
A sense of desolation smote Gary and he felt an alien fear gripping at his soul.
He shivered. This wasn't the way a man should feel on his own home planet.
This wasn't the way a man should feel on coming home from the very edge of everything.
But it wasn't the edge of everything, he reminded himself. It was just the edge of the universe. For the universe wasn't everything. Beyond it, stretching for uncountable, mind-shattering distances, were other universes. The universe was just a tiny unit of the whole, perhaps as tiny a unit of the whole as the Earth was a tiny unit of its universe. A grain of sand upon the beach, he thought — less than a grain of sand upon the beach.
And this might not be Earth, of course. It might be just the shadow of the Earth — a probability that gained strength and substance and a semblance of being because it missed being an actuality by a mere hair's-breadth.
His mind whirled at the thought of it, at the astounding vista of possibilities that the thought brought up, the infinite number of possibilities that existed as shadows, each with a queer shadow existence of its very own, things that just missed being realities. Disappointed ghosts, he thought, wailing their way through the eternity of nonexistence.
Caroline was close beside him. Her voice came to him through the helmet phones, a tiny voice. "Gary, everything is so strange.”
"Yes," he said. "Strange.”