"I said give it to me straight," she retorted. "All right. Your guess is as good as mine. Frankly, it looks like the end. But it looked like the end when we shot off into space. Somehow we've existed up to now." He spoke impersonally, trying to keep the sympathy he felt out of his voice: "Come to think, Norma, I'm puzzled--" He stopped, but she finished for him. "You can't understand why a person who's been through what I have should get the willies now. I'm not afraid of something I can fight. I'm not afraid of dying. It's eerie things you can't fight that get me. Hearing that girl Pearl talk gives me the creeps. She calls this a 'little world.' What does she mean?" Marlin started. He had used the term himself; probably that was how it came to fall from Pearl's lips. "I know what she means," Norma answered her own question vehemently. "It is a little world. I was a part of it, I tell you, while I lay there between life and death. I sensed things through its consciousness--if you can imagine such a thing. I knew what all of you were doing, just as if you were maggots crawling around inside of me. I had a feeling of what it was bound for--this grinding and crushing and churning in space. And we're no more to it than the mice and bugs that happened to get mired in the sticky clay while it was forming." Marlin looked at her blankly. Despite her vehemence, she had herself under control--though at the cost of what effort he could only guess. The strange thing was that he himself had been subject to like fancies. "Natural forces are--rather impersonal," he conceded. "I hate natural forces! I hate this little world and everybody in it! Why did you help pull me back to life? I never wanted to live. I could have kicked off in a gunfight and had no beef. But here we're helpless like rats in a trap. Why don't we all kill ourselves and get it over with?" Marlin shrugged. It was pleasanter talking to Pearl. Her unruffled poise almost amounted to an assurance that nothing could happen which particularly mattered. * * * * * On her next visit, with Norma's outburst fresh in mind, he reverted to the subject Pearl had once inspired. "That idea about the world having a consciousness of its own may not be altogether screwy," he told her. "It would explain a lot of things that we take for granted. As an entity, it might very logically take a hand in the involvement of beings in its sphere of influence. Our surface life--the flora and fauna, including man--no doubt play an essential part in its evolution. The Earth entity, with its natural forces--the winds, tides, changes of temperature, volcanic eruptions, and such like--could easily direct the spread of these forms. "Come to think--that's just what it has been doing, from the dawn of life. The only question is whether it happened by intention. Of course, I'm too much of a reasoning creature to believe such rot."