Buckmaster had reasoned well, considering his natural limitations. But the truth he had discovered was, like most truths, only part of a greater truth. In the far reaches of infinity, beyond the outermost boundaries of space, a thought-voice spoke. "Am I going to die?" it asked. "Not now," a second entity answered. "The crisis is past." "Will the sickness come again?" "Not this particular form of malevolent psychosis," the second entity replied. "But perhaps you had better tell me all the facts you know so that I can advise you about the future." "My project, I still believe, was magnificent," the sick entity began. "From the energy of my essence I materialized a world of infinitesimal creatures. I gave them time and space, and built a background of a universe for their wonderment and speculation. They dwelt on their world, lived their lives, and made their tiny, though admirable, advances as they saw their destiny. And then, suddenly, when all seemed beautiful, something went wrong, and I was ill unto death. What did I do that was not right?" "I believe you made your mistake when you gave your creatures free will. They developed their malignancies, as well as their admirabilities. When they developed a malignancy of such virulence that they were in a position to destroy themselves, you made yourself vulnerable to death, through them. The shock of that devastation to you would have killed you. Tell me, were your creatures aware that they were figments of your mind?" "Some grasped inklings of it, though none were certain. One, a Baruch Spinoza, came as close to the truth as it was possible, for their finite minds. He wrote: _We are the flitting forms of a being greater than ourselves, and endless while we die. Our bodies are cells in the body of the race, our race is an incident in the drama of life; our minds are the fitful flashes of an eternal light. Our mind, in so far as it understands, is an eternal mode of thinking, which is determined by another mode of thinking, and this one again by another, and so on to infinity._ That was magnificent. While others who caught inklings of the truth believed that I was an ultimate being, he realized that I, too, had an ultimate being whom I worshipped." "Also, if he had been able to perceive how close you were to death," the second entity said, "he would have realized that you were mortal, which no ultimate being can be." "How were you able to circumvent the disaster that so nearly befell me?" "I sent a segment of my own mentality into your conceived world. I gave it a name, implanted a memory of a past into its mind, and that same memory into the minds of those creatures with whom it was supposed to have come into contact, in its past. Through that segment I was able to destroy the awful potentiality, as well as the creature who controlled it. The secret now rests with the dead." "Is there any chance of a similar recurrence?"