Crying? Clutching desperately at this frigid slip of a girl for salvation, when the whole universe awaited him? He pushed himself up, away from her; he heard her voice as if from a great distance, making words, but he was past words. Blackness closed in about them; time slowed, the eddies of air swirled to a halt, and lances of fire swirled through his mind. Then, beyond the realm of three dimensions he _saw_ her, clearly. His mind shattered into a thousand crystals, reflecting prismatically pounding emotions he could not directly face. He looked at Fran, into her, through her, beyond her. He saw; not the immobilized figure of a frightened woman, her body helpless beneath his own on the sofa. In fact, he saw not even the sofa. He saw; beyond the immediacy of the fields of motion contained in finite space as his body, he comprehended other patterns of sub-atomic flux. Below him was a geometrically ordered matrix, a precise framework simply constructed. But above it he found an area of disorder. Complexity, confusion, patterns and sub-patterns of a structure so immensely varied and subtly differentiated as to be nearly incomprehensible. The motion! Movement! _Life!_ It offended him. It was vulgar, teeming, unruly, impossible! He began to reach out to it.... "MAX!" A body had flung itself at him, kicking, scratching, screaming. He was toppled back and suddenly lying on the floor, back in the narrow confines of a single body again. His head rang and her words were slowly becoming words again. They hurt his ears, jangling with their ridiculous cadences against the sublime expanse of perception. "No, _no_! I loved you, but you--you're mad--you're not Max--" And then she had flung herself through the door and was gone, her running footsteps growing fainter on the stairs. * * * * * Slowly, Max surrendered himself to a chair, without any awareness of his human motions. The old chair enveloped him with the old overstuffed cushioned arms and gave him a musty embrace and for a moment he was part of all its enfolding past, the weariness that had come into its unrejecting depths for comfort and rest. His face was still wet with the tears he had shed before, and now they began to swell and flow again, erupting and cascading almost without volition. Fran was gone. She was gone, and she had been all he had, all that was ever really real to him. Dimly he sensed, without knowing, that it had been a double failure. Fran had refused, rejected his need--but was it Fran's fault, that he had been unable to reach her? Had he ever been able to reach any human creature? Had he ever _wanted_ to, except in his own selfish desire? He spoke of loving Fran, and yet he had shied away from that answer--until he needed her.