"You think it wasn't an accident? That it may have been a murder?"

"I don't know. The thought has occurred to me. There was one funny thing about it-something that never was explained. There was a funny smell about the body and the area. A strange sort of odor, like nothing anyone had ever smelled before. Maybe someone found out that there were two of you. For some reason, someone may not have wanted two of you."

"But who could have known there were two of me?"

"The people on that other planet. If there were people."

"There were people," Maxwell said. "It was a most amazing place..."

It all came back as he sat there talking, almost as if he were there again. A crystal place-or that had been what it had looked to be when he first had seen it. An extensive crystal plain that ran on and on and a crystal sky with crystal pillars reaching from the plain and upward, apparently to the sky, although the tops of them were lost in the milkiness of sky-pillars soaring upward to hold the sky in place. An empty place, to make one think of a deserted ballroom. of extensive size, all cleaned and polished for a ball, waiting for the music and the dancers who had never come and now would never come, leaving the ballroom empty through all eternity, shining in all its polished -glitter and its wasted graciousness.

A ballroom, but a ballroom without any walls, running on and on, not to a horizon, for there seemed to be no horizon, but to a point where the sky- that strange, milk-glass sky-came down to meet the crystal floor.

He stood astounded in the vast immensity, an immensity not of boundless sky, for the sky was far from boundless, nor from great distances, for the distances were not great, but immensity that was measured as a room would be, as if one were in a giant's house and lost and were looking for a door, and without a clue as to where a door might be.