Louise shook her head and surreptitiously slipped away from the group of scientists and reporters, dabbing at her eyes with a tiny handkerchief. Her car was outside. What she needed was the long drive back home alone under the moon.

"Miss Daren!"

One of the reporters had followed her to the parking area. It was cold up here on Mount Palomar. She could see the other's breath condensing in the air. A bone-chilling wind had begun to blow and she was impatient to be gone.

"Yes?" she said tonelessly.

"I just wanted to say how sorry we all are--"

"And squeeze some more story out of me," she snapped irritably. "Well, I wish you'd leave me alone now. I've cooperated enough."

As she turned to get into the car, he detained her, firmly but not roughly.

"I assure you I understand," he said, "but there's something important I want to clear up."

"Important?" She paused to look at the twin moons reflected by the other's spectacles.

"Didn't your father tell you, before he passed away, that on the first trip out they all had a fight with Flannigan?"

"Yes. They wanted to turn back when they learned about the bad radiation effects in outer space, and on account of the meteors, but he insisted on going on."

"What I'm getting at is this: didn't you say that they had to strike him with a heavy wrench or something--that it made a big gash in his head?"

The reporter thought he saw her stiffen suddenly. Her face was noticeably pale in the semi-darkness.

"No," she answered. "If I said that I was only adding my own impression. I--I was too upset at the press hearing."

"But I know you said they struck him with a wrench. You see, this point is important, because--"

"Because photographs taken of him after his return reveal that he bore no such scar on his head," she interrupted. "That alone should prove to you I was wrong about the gash. I'm sorry I can't add any more to the story. I'm cold and I don't feel well. Good night!

Later on the lonely road down the mountain, her pulse roared in her ears like the cold wind against the windshield. Her father had described that gash in detail! He had said it was a bloody mess, and he had thought they had killed him. But then Flannigan had broken out of his bunk under ten gravs of deceleration and taken over the controls again, filled with a superhuman strength.

It was after that, she recalled, that Flannigan said he had gone through the Lens to play the role of godling in a faery universe! Her car swerved on the road and she had to slow to a stop and sit there staring at the moon.

Had the Lens healed every wound, as he claimed? That would account for the absence of an ugly scar on his forehead. And it would also account for his having endured the moon's radioactive poisoning. What he was infected with before his metamorphosis in the Lens, had been cleansed. Only after coming back had he been infected, which would thus have amounted to half as much as for the others!

The wind screeched around her parked car while ragged, silver-edged clouds raced above the waving trees and across the moon. The night seemed suddenly upside down and she hung from the bottom of the world about to fall into the endlessness of space. The wind was like something out of the starry abyss, seeking to pluck her into Eternity. She grew giddy with a sense of agoraphobia and clutched at the steering wheel for balance and reassurance.

She shook her head, trying to regain a foothold in the rational world of her own terra firma. It was all so insane. There could be no Lens. No hidden universe.

But the thought assailed her again, as it had back there along the highway, that there was such a thing as the Land of the Lens, and she wondered, in spite of herself, if Flannigan would make it, after all. And if he returned there, would it be as god or man? If he were too late and Mnir'sr Nikin'ra had already gone to Zi'ilgar-Lon, would he follow her?

Into her mind crept a vision of a lonely, bewhiskered space pilot, his eyes glued to his periscope, desperately maneuvering a badly battered and leaking ship toward his goal, beyond Serenitatis, over the lunar Apennines, lower still, hurtling across Eratosthenes, onward toward broad Copernicus and Mare Imbrium--toward the towering enigma that was Rheingold, the ultimate answer to life or death.

"Michael! Michael!" she sobbed. "May God preserve you."

She sat there crying bitterly while the wind howled and the moon sank out of sight below the far, far horizon...

For hours after encountering the meteor barrage, Flannigan had worked in the absolute darkness of this airless control room, suffering the prolonged discomfort of a space suit. Oxygen did not worry him. There were extra tanks, plenty of them--like a banquet for the damned before the execution. They knew he could never return.

But the landing was what bothered him. His ship was full of holes. He had the decelerators, but half his navigating batteries were out of control--and he knew he could not maneuver a vertical descent as before. It would have to be a belly-flop at nearly four hundred miles an hour. Where on the moon could he make such a landing without killing himself?

He was breathing hard inside his space helmet. A nerve-searing fire consumed his mind and strength. It was already time for death, but out here where no one could know Death's secrets he was borrowing extra time. For until he reached the Lens again he refused to die.

He was close in now, and the jagged, seven-mile-high peaks of the Apennines reached out like titanic claws as though determined to retard him from his forbidden purpose. Forbidden it might be to twist the warp of Fate, for this return of his was not predestined. The prophecy was done. The power of the Lens had returned to another slumber of the ages. The god-strength was gone from him. He was returning on his own, for very personal reasons.

The vision of Mnir'sr Nikin'ra floated into his fevered mind as she had come to him that magical night on the shores of Ces'son Nar in that other land beyond the Lens. Beneath the golden and purple moons, Lan Ba'na and Ral, she had come wearing white flowers in her incredible hair, her perfect feet, like those of a miniature pink porcelain gazelle, running toward him.

She whose eyes were like the dawn

Where night embraces day...

She who sings no more of me,

Who walks into Eternity

Taking only memory

Of love, like blossoms, withered...

The haunting song came back to him and filled him with a fever of life that challenged every force of Nature that sought to keep him from her. It was a song out of the ages, that belonged to her--and to him.

Tears of desperation filled his eyes, blurring his vision at the most crucial moment. He had the impression of crashing as he saw, in the periscope, a jagged cliff come hurtling at him.

But there was only a sharp "ping" as the rocket chipped its top and plunged onward, with white-hot decelerators blazing their last. He was sure it must have been either Eratosthenes or Copernicus. Then dead ahead lay the Mare Imbrium--and Rheingold!

He yelled with all the power in his lungs in order to sharpen his senses and to relieve the horrible pains of radioactive burning inside him, and he gripped the controls in a blind frenzy of renewed determination, while his life flickered uncertainly between the irresistible force of his momentum and the immovable object of the moon itself.

In a small fraction of a second be maneuvered to one side of Rheingold and belly-flopped onto the Mare Imbrium. Which turned out to be an ocean, after all.

An ocean of impalpable dust, on which he planed for miles. Clouds of it rose behind him, only to fall abruptly to rest for lack of an atmosphere to suspend them.

At last the ship came swirling to a halt, far out in that waterless sea, while the naked stars looked down at this additional piece of flotsam deposited by the endless tides of Time in a place beyond desolation, alien to Heaven and to Hell, without sound or motion--save for the occasional dust explosions where meteors struck...

It was very easy for Flannigan to lose all sense of time, out there in his space suit wading through the interminable cosmic dust that covered the Mare Imbrium. His only clock was his oxygen supply, four hours for each tank. And he had changed two tanks, with only four spares left to go.

But sometimes he forgot about the oxygen, and his struggle seemed to take place neither in the world of the living nor that of the dead, but in a timeless Limbo, where exertion, pain and vertigo were personified into relentless demons impeding him and changing his body into clay. He was laboring under one-sixth of Earth's gravity but carrying five-hundred Earth pounds of equipment, and now it seemed he was even carrying the moon.

Under the direct rays of the rising sun, the temperature was rising in his suit, in spite of refrigeration. Soon it would had above boiling temperature outside, and inside he could expect heat in excess of 110 degrees Fahrenheit. This would rise as his batteries grew weaker.

Five times his metal hood had been struck by small meteors, knocking him flat beneath the surface of the dust. A large blow would obliterate him.

And in the meantime, the radioactivity of the moon assailed him, increasing his life-consuming fever.

Under any other circumstances, Flannigan knew he would have succumbed. But desperation mingled with an Irish temper kept the vision of Rheingold crater clear in his bloodshot eyes. He had increased the polarization of his vision panel almost to opacity, but Rheingold's towering wall still glared through.

Hell would have been easier to traverse, he thought, pressing within his metal mitt the siphon bulb that brought precious water through a tube to his parched lips and at the same time sprayed his perspiring face. In his left ear he heard the Geiger clicking louder. Though it meant greater proximity to death, it also meant he was closer to his goal. It was the craters that produced most of the radioactive disturbance, and Rheingold was a crater.

Rheingold--home of the Lens. Up over the great wall, down inside, into that dark cavern he had found. He knew he would not lose the way even in his fevered delirium, for he had traversed that path a thousand times in his dreams. Just as he had fought, again and again, with the ancient, enemies of the red-skinned Serin Ni, with the green men, across the Barrier Sea, in Bi'djar-Tan. True to his predestined mission, he had saved the red men from destruction and given them the power to maintain peace.

Or had he?

As his mind staggered between consciousness and oblivion, a clear picture returned to him of his last moments there in the secret land he sought, during the last invasion of Serin Tan by the green men...