No doubt it would baffle the other man too, Dane decided--the Being-Without-A-Name, the mind-talker who'd spent so much time and effort trying to force subservience upon him. Or did that strange hairless, hollow-eyed, fiend-faced man even exist? Thinking back over everything, Dane couldn't help but wonder. In retrospect, a nightmare quality clung to the whole incident, as if perhaps it were delusion, hallucination, rather than reality. In any case, it didn't matter, because now, dying here, he'd never know. And that was too bad, in a way, because there were so many things Dane knew in his heart he'd like to have uncovered. Things like the secret of his own identity, his past and future ... the meaning of the shining shaft he'd seen and that he knew was somehow bound close to his own destiny ... the business of the Kalquoi yat-stick, and how it came to be in the bleak asteroidal cave where the survey ship had found him. The gelatinous mass had reached his neck now. It wouldn't be much longer. Dane laughed harshly. "Come on, damn it! Get it over with!" He wrenched his right arm free; hurled the yat-stick out into the center of the viscid mass attacking him. The ooze crept to his chin. Time stood still, every second dragging out to an eternity. Dane closed his eyes. As if it were a signal, a rhythm seemed to start up in his brain: _Dane ... Dane ... Dane...._ His own name, endlessly repeated. The beginning of a death-throe madness, perhaps, Dane decided with a queer sense of abstraction. Like magic, the pattern changed: _John Dane ... John Dane ... John Dane...._ In spite of himself, Dane felt a quick-glowing spark of interest. Almost without volition, he spoke aloud: "Not John Dane. Clark Dane." The rhythm in his brain faltered; broke. In its place came a vague uneasiness, a restless groping: _Clark Dane--? Clark Dane? No, no. John Dane. JOHN Dane!_ "CLARK Dane," Dane reiterated firmly. * * * * * Instantly, the previous uneasiness returned, but multiplied a hundred-fold. Needles of pain shot through his brain. The pale grey emptiness of his prison vanished in a blaze of purple light. Even the gelatinous sea of protoplasm enveloping Dane seemed to transmit a sudden shiver. Dane opened his eyes. But the purple light was no pain-born illusion. Rather, it glinted even brighter now than before. Its source was a crystal ... a strange, radiant crystal that floated before Dane in mid-air. Now, while he watched, the purple light changed to green; then red; then yellow. The crystal, too, was changing. Before his eyes, it writhed and stretched until it was a glowing aquamarine ladder, modeled after the one down which Dane had come into the bem-tank. A moment later it was a bright blue bottle; then a cerise cube; then once again a crystal, orange and golden.