The sky, white and dazzling, glistened. The gray murk glistened too, a hundred yards off in all directions, like a wall of polished glass surrounding them. In the very middle of the bell-jar of visibility granted them all at once, stood a black rectangular object. "The teleporter!" Margot cried. "The matter-transmitter! I know it is. I _know_ it is!" Ramsey stood waiting breathlessly. No, he realized abruptly, not breathlessly. You couldn't say breathlessly. For Ramsey had not breathed, not once, since they left the _Enterprise_. You didn't breathe on a timeless world. You merely--somehow--existed. "It's opening!" Margot cried. The black rectangle, ominously coffin-shaped, was indeed opening. "The matter transmitter," Margot said a second time. "The secret of proto-man, of our ancestors who colonized all the worlds of space with it, instantly, at the same cosmic moment. Think of what it means, Ramsey, can you? Instantaneous travel, anywhere, without the need for energy since energy cannot be used here, without the passage of time since time does not exist here." She stood transfixed, looking at the black box. The lid had lifted at right angles to the rest of the box. * * * * * Margot said, in the whisper of an awed thought: "Who controls it controls the galaxy...." And she walked toward the box. At that moment Ramsey had a vision. He saw--or thought he saw--Margot Dennison in the costume she had worn when they first met. She stood, eyes wide, fearful, expectant, before a chess-board. The pieces seemed to be spaceships. It was a perfectly clear vision, but it was the only such vision Ramsey had ever been vouchsafed in his life. He was no mystic. He did not know what to make of it. Playing chess with Margot was--proto-man. Ramsey only saw his hand. A hand perhaps five million years old. He blinked. The vision persisted, superimposed over Margot's figure as she walked toward the box. A game, he thought. Because we don't understand it. Not that kind of power. Not the power a matter-transmitter would give. A cosmic game on a chess-board which wasn't quite a chess-board, with a creature who had never lived as we know life and so could never die.... With the future of the galaxy hanging in the balance. Life or death for man hanging on a slim thread, because man wasn't ready for matter-transmission, couldn't hope to use it wisely, would use it perhaps for war, transmitting lethal weapons, thermonuclear, world-destroying weapons, instantly through space, for delivery anywhere, negating time.... Death hovered. "Wait!" Ramsey called, and ran forward. Just then five new figures, space-suited, appeared under the gleaming dome. "Stop that woman!" a voice which Ramsey should not have been able to hear but which he somehow heard perfectly cried. "Stop her!" M.g. guns were raised, fired. Without effect.