Once more, he quivered, and his heart beat harder. Two hands had seized his face. Now they were running the tips over his face. Before they had withdrawn, he became bold enough to reach out and do the same thing to the person who was tracing his lineaments. The skin was almost as velvety as a baby's, and the bones below them were fine. It had to be a woman's. Then she spoke-he could feel her breath from her mouth onto timehand-and she said, "Son."

"Mother!" Jack said.

He almost fainted.

It was not only her voice that told him that she was indeed his long-dead mother. His fingers, moving over her face, had evoked an artist's image. It would, if he painted it, be a portrait of her.

But she was now a young woman. When she had died, she had been middle-aged, close to being old. She had home him when she was forty-eight, her time of fertility almost gone. The wrinkles and the sags he was so familiar with had disappeared.

A whisper came to him. Someone must be speaking very softly to Tappy because she had suddenly begun shaking far more violently than before. He could not hear her reply, of course, any more than she would have heard him say, "Mother!" But she must have tried to utter something.

Things went swiftly after that. Hands turned them around so that they faced the direction from which they had come. They were pushed along, past the clusters of flowers, went up a long slope, were on level ground, and then began a long march. Jack was so numb with shock that he could not resist them. What sense was there in doing so, anyway? Yet ... yet ... he had met his dead mother; he could not speak to her; he was being sent away.

When Jack and Tappy became tired and slowed down or tried to halt, they were urged by gentle but firm hands to pick up the fast pace again. He had no idea how much time had passed.

He became thirsty and wished that these people would give him water. Then he thought of the myths and fairy tales where the intruder from Earth drank the liquid offered for refreshment and of what happened to the intruder after that. He was doomed to live out the rest of his life in the domain of faery and to never see Earth again. It was better that he refuse water, no matter how much he craved it. Or was he just seized with superstitious dread?

Nothing superstitious about this place, he thought. It did ex' 1st.

So did its citizens. Thus, he and Tappy were in a supernatural or intranatural world.

The numbness permeating him was good for one thing. It seemed to deaden the pain from the light and the pain of being united with his mother for a few seconds and then hurried off.

But he was not so inwardly frozen that he did not guess that he was being sent away for his own good.

Abruptly, the hands held them back. Since he had heard his mother, he had heard no voices.

Now the hands pressed on them, and Jack finally got the idea.

They wanted him to get down on all fours. He did so, feeling with one hand to make sure that Tappy was with him. For some time, he had feared that she had been left behind. But she was . with him and also on her hands and knees.

Hands pushed on his buttocks. Tappy stayed where she was.

For a moment, he thought of resisting. Then he thought that, if she were to remain here, she would not have been made to get down on all fours. He moved ahead until his head scraped against something hard. A hand pushed down on his neck. He got down lower and resumed crawling. The grass was gone. The floor seemed to be hard earth, then became mud. Presently, he had to go like a snake on his belly. If he tried to raise himself, his head bumped against stone or what seemed to be stone. That did not last long. All of a sudden, the floor dipped, and he was sliding downward on the soft mud. landing on hard earth.

Then that was behind him, Something struck the bottom of his shoes, and somebody gasped and then cried, "Jack!" He turned over and sat up. Though thick mud coated Tappy's face, it did not conceal her strange expression.

"Mother and Father were there."

JACK did not reply at once. He rose, feeling tired, and looked around. It had been night when they had plunged through the shadow. Now it was just past dawn. The sky was bright and cloudless, but the sun had not come up above the crater wall.

Tappy sat in the mud like a statue shaped from it. Even the Imaget, crouched on her shoulder, was a hunk of water-soaked earth.

He did not know where they were on the crater floor. The Gaol spaceship was not visible, and there was no grove of trees like those under the ship, nor was there any Gaol camp. He turned slowly while he looked at the great figures on the crater ring, dim objects in the gray light.

After his survey. two things caught his mind's focus. One was the faint shadow through which they had just exited. A fan-shaped pi 're of mud, drying at its edge, extended from the base of the shadow. Here had once been a huge boulder which a radiator beam had disintegrated, no telling how long ago. The crumbled rock was in a heap beneath the death-shadow, the outline of which could be barely seen. It was close to fading away entirely. When it did, Jack thought, that gateway to the "other" world, the world of blinding light, would be closed.

He noted that more than people could enter and then leave that light-filled world on the other side of the darkness. Mud could also pass through the dark gate.

They had gone into that world through the tree-shadow beneath the spaceship. And they had left it through this bou dershadow. They had been pushed back into the world to which they belonged. But they had reentered far from the point of entry.

Darkness implied light. There were no shadows without light, and the death-shadow was caused by the blinding light. At least, it seemed so to him.

This place was comparatively close to where he and Tappy had gone in. Probably, it was the first time that this had happened. He did not doubt that it had been no accident. Those people, the dead who were not really dead, had pushed them through this particular gate for a purpose. What the purpose was, he did not know.

But he wondered if the second object that had caught his attention was involved in the purpose.

That was a rose-red cut-quartz stone not sixty feet from where he stood. It was the model of the tiny stone Jack had seen centered in the model of the real crater-wall rings, the model he had seen on the table when he was in the underground complex. A seat and a back, a throne, had been carved out of the desk-sized quartz.

According to the Integrator, the first honkers to enter the crater had found it. Though they did not know who had made it, they assumed that it was the work of the Makers. But it was obviously designed for a honker or a human and not for a quadruped.

By then, Tappy had risen shakily from her sitting position.

Her tears were washing the mud from her face. Her hands were clasped just below her breasts. He did then what he would have done at once if he had not been so stunned. He went to her and held her while she wept. A few seconds later, he was weeping also.

"My mother ... she spoke to me! And my father did, tool They only said my name, but I recognized their voices!"

"My mother," Jack said. "She spoke only one word to me, but I felt her face. And ... you heard Malva, too!"

"What was that place?" she said.

"Some place where the dead live. Heaven, for all I know."

He had never believed that there was an afterlife. At times, he had hoped that there might be, but he had no faith that there was.

It was a fairy tale which rational people knew was a fairy tale.

But now ...

"How could we have gotten there?" she said. Her sobs were tapering off. "There's only one way to get there, and we didn't die."