"Daddy calls this his reading room. He says it's cozier than his library or office. Most often he just comes in here to nap."

They sat down on the couch and fell to eating at once. Spence sampled a bite of each of the items on his plate in turn before devouring them one at a time.

"It's very good," he mumbled around a mouthful. "Only the best for our guests."

He regarded her with a look of genuine gratitude. "Thanks for inviting me. I don't usually-" He stopped, "I'm glad I came."

She looked down at her plate. "I'm glad you came, too. I guess I didn't think you would."

"To tell you the truth, I didn't either." "What changed your mind?"

"I don't know. Maybe I'm just a pushover for chocolate mousse."

"Then we'll have to serve it more often," she said gaily. "But you're not eating yours."

He glanced down at his plate. It had become a muddied palette of confused colors and textures. He put it down on the table in front of him. "I don't like mousse," he admitted.

She laughed then, and to Spence it seemed as if the room suddenly brightened. "Silly, then why did you let me give it to you?"

"I don't know, you seemed to be enjoying yourself."

Ari blushed slightly and lowered her head. "Well, I am." She seemed to become flustered then and said no more.

Silence reclaimed the room and laid a gulf between them. It grew until neither one wanted to cross it. The atmosphere became sticky.

"Ari, I'm not too good at this sort of thing." Spence was surprised to hear his own voice bleating uncertainly into the vacuum.

"You don't have to say anything," said Ari. She raised her blue eyes to his. "I understand."

"It's just that I…" Words failed him.

"Please, it isn't important." She smiled at him and cocked her head to one side. "I think we should rejoin the party. Daddy will wonder what happened to me."

"You're right." Spence stood slowly. Ari remained seated, and he looked down on her and then offered his hand and helped her to her feet.

"Thanks," he said softly.

They crossed the room and Ari turned, putting on her jaunty demeanor again, once more the vivacious hostess. "We'll be lucky if they don't eat the tablecloth as well," she said as they passed the buffet.

"Well, next time I get hungry for mousse, I know where to come," said Spence.

She turned to him and placed her hand on his arm. "I hope you won't wait that long." Before he could answer she whirled away into the crowd and was gone. …

SPENCE WALKED BACK To his quarters alone in a mood of fluttery anticipation, almost wonder. He had forgotten his anxiety of only hours before; in fact, he had forgotten a great many things. What had taken possession of him now left no room for those darker thoughts. Though he had no name for what he felthaving never felt it before-he knew it to be in no small way connected with the person of Ariadne Zanderson.

The warmth of the feeling surprised and confused him. It was wholly beyond his rational ability to describe. It seemed to defy objective analysis, leaving him fumbling for an explanation like a man groping for a light switch in a dark room. That the elusive feeling might be love did not occur to him.

He punched in his code and the panel whispered back, admitting him into the darkened lab. Neither Tickler nor Kurt were to be seen; he guessed they had finished and gone long ago. That suited him. He did not care to think about the project, Tickler, or the scans. All he wanted was to throw off his jumpsuit and flop into bed-which he did, after leaving an alarm call with MIRA. …

SPENCE PEERED INTO THE depths of a vast chasm as the rumble of underground thunder shook the rocks he clung to fearfully. His inward parts trembled to the awesome roar. Below him, whirling in the seething darkness, he could see strange shapes churning and grinding, sending up a fine blue powder like a velvet mist.

Great jagged flashes of blue lightning rent the air and peeled away the darkness of the pit. He looked down and saw clearly into the tumbling mass below. In the fleeting illumination of the lightning he saw the groaning, shuddering, grinding contents of the pit: bones. The enormous skeletal remains of gigantic prehistoric creatures, thrashing in perpetual motion.

A bolt of lightning raked the rock on which he perched and he felt his hands torn away as he fell backward into the chasm. He twisted in the air, his fingers clawing empty space for a hold on the rock. It was too late.

Spence plunged screaming into the whirling dance of the bones.

Down and down he spun, turning and turning. The fine blue grit ascending on the warm updrafts stung his eyes and filled his nose and mouth, choking him. He squirmed and gasped as black mists closed around him.

The sound of the terrible rumbling thunder gradually died away. He dropped like a stone through formless space. He felt nothing and heard nothing-only the beating of his own heart and the thump of his blood as it pounded in his ears. He felt as if he would fall forever. He told himself the notion was absurd.

Perhaps, thought Spence, I am not falling at all. But what else could it be? All at once a new terror seized his mind: he was shrinking. Instantly he could feel himself becoming smaller -dwindling by fine degrees, becoming ever smaller. Though he had no point of reference by which to gauge himself, he felt that by now he must be very tiny. And still the shrinking continued.

This is the way it will end, thought Spence. The universe imploding on itself, racing back into its flash of creation, compressing its atoms back into that single elemental spark from which all matter was born. And he was part of it; he was one with it. Now and forever. …

THERE WAS NO WAKING this time. Spence was fully conscious of his surroundings, and was aware, too, that he had been conscious for some time. There simply was no dividing line he could point to and say, "Here I was asleep, and here awake." The shadowy line between waking and dreaming had been erased. It no longer existed. In Spence's mind dream and reality had merged.

Before him hung the shimmering iridescent halo of blue light with its tendrils glowing faintly as they waved in the darkness of his quarters. The luminous tendrils seemed to be reaching out for him, pulling him up into the green shining halo. He felt the rising, pulling, falling sensation and knew that he had felt it before in just this way.

He knew that he had experienced all this before-the shining wreath, the glistening tendrils, the shapeless mass moving darkly in the center-he knew it, but there was no memory of it. There was simply a knowing.

He watched in grim fascination as the swirling inner eye of the halo condensed into a glimmering mass of light. He felt a pressure in his chest; his lungs burned and he realized he had been holding his breath. His heart flung itself against his ribs and he could smell the fear rising from him as the reek from the fur of a wet animal. But the thing held him firmly in his place.

The terror seemed merely a physical response. He noted it with scientific curiosity, as one might note the progress of water boiling in a beaker and turning into steam, or chart the stages of a well -known chemical reaction. The horror he felt belonged to another part of him, and that part no longer connected with his mind.

A sound like needles clinking or glass slivers breaking against one another rose in volume. He noted the sound and marked how it seemed to tingle on the surface of his skin. He gazed more deeply into the green halo and saw the forms within weaving themselves into vaguely human shapes. These ghostly features then hardened into the recognizable form of a face-the thin, wasted face of Hocking.

Spence blinked back dully at the leering apparition. His mouth was dry; he could not speak or cry out. The will to do so had left him.