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ever, was
that he was actually outside the boundaries of space; actually beyond the
confines of
time. He was going past, not through, those spaces and those times.
He was now in each space long enough to study it in some detail. He was
an
immense distance above this one; at such a distance that he could perceive
many
globular super-universes; each of which in turn was composed of billions of
lenticular
galaxies.
Another one. Closer now. Galaxies only; the familiar random masses whose
apparent lack of symmetrical grouping is due to the limitations of
Civilization's
observers. He was still going too fast to stop.
In the next space Kinnison found himself within the limits of a solar
system and
tried with all the force of his mind to get in touch with some intelligent
entity upon
oneany one of its planets. Before he could succeed, that system vanished and
he
was dropping, from a height of a few thousand kilometers, toward the surface
of a warm
and verdant world, so much like Tellus that he thought for an instant he must
have
circumnavigated total space. The aspect, the ice-caps, the cloud-effects, were
identical.
The oceans, however, while similar, were different; as were the continents.
The
mountains were larger and rougher and harder.
He was falling much too fast. A free fall from infinity wouldn't give him
this much
speed!
This whole affair was, as he had decided once before, absolutely
impossible. It
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was simply preposterous to believe that a naked man, especially one without
blood-
circulation or breath, could still be alive after spending as many weeks in
open space as
he had just spent. He knew that he was alive. Therefore none of this was
happening;
even though, as surely as he knew that he was alive, he knew that he was
falling.
"Jet back, Lensman!" he thought viciously to himself; tried to shout it
aloud.
For this could be deadly stuff, if he let himself believe it. If he
believed that he
was falling from any such height he would die in the instant of landing. He
would not
actually crash; his body would not move from wherever it was that it was.
Nevertheless
the shock of that wholly imaginary crash would kill him just as dead and just
as
instantaneously as though all his flesh had been actually smashed into a
crimson smear
upon one of the neighboring mountain's huge, fiat rocks.
"Pretty close, my bright young Plooran friend, but you didn't quite ring
the bell,"
he thought savagely, trying with all the power of his mind to break through
the zone of
compulsion. "So I'm telling you something right now. If you want to kill me
you'll have to
do it physically, and you haven't got jets enough to swing the load. You might
as well cut
your zone, because this kind of stuff has been pulled on me by experts, and it
hasn't
worked yet."
He was apparently failing, feet downward, toward an open, grassy mountain
meadow, surrounded by forests, through which meandered a small stream. He was
so
close now that he could perceive the individual blades of grass in the meadow
and the
small fishes in the stream; and he was still apparently at terminal velocity.
Without his years of spacehound's training in inertialess maneuvering, he
might
have died even before he landed, but speed as speed did not affect him at all.
He was
used to instantaneous stops from light-speeds. The only thing that worried him
was the
matter of inertia. Was he inert or free?
He declared to himself that he was free. Or, rather, that he had been,
was, and
would continue to be motionless. It was physically, mathematically,
intrinsically
impossible that any of this stuff had actually occurred. It was all
compulsion, pure and
simple, and heKimball Kinnison, Gray Lensmanwould not let it get him down.
He
clenched his mental teeth upon that belief and held it doggedly. One bare foot
struck the
tip of a blade of grass and his entire body came to a shockless halt. He
grinned in
reliefthis was what he had wanted, but had not quite dared wholly to expect.
There
followed immediately, however, other events which he had not expected at all.
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