In that timeless minute I felt the interplay of forces greater than the human mind can conceive. The pile and the Sun glared at one another. There is no other way it can be said. They _looked_ at each other ... and something happened. The Sun called to that mindless life that was the essence of Clem ... and she answered! She did! And all the others felt it too! In that instant the atomic fire in Clem's heart ... that fire spawned of the Sun ... awoke! And there was _oneness_! The sunbeam passed and darkness fell once again in the shaft. All of us stood about in silence. All of us convinced of what we had seen and felt, and yet each afraid to give voice to it. Colloidal life is too vain, somehow, to admit another, more vital sort of life into our neat little cosmos. Even when the proof of it happens before your eyes, you pass it off as ... imagination. We did. Or tried. The pile subsided into a sullen glow, and we pushed the thing from our minds. We had _seen_ nothing. And men in danger are sometimes confused. That's the way we rationalized it. Quickly, then, we finished the repairs and Holcomb tested for power. The meter snapped to life eagerly. We had our ship again and we could proceed. An hour before we had felt doomed, but now Mars and safety seemed near at hand. The passengers, of course, were both dead. Three tubemen had perished in the shaft. That left six crewmen and three officers. And Clem.... We retreated from the shaft because of the radiation that still leaked through the sprung shielding, and somehow or other all of us managed to stay out for the next two weeks. Living in suits was hard on the nerves. One doesn't often think of all the inconveniences involved. But having your beard grow in your helmet, for instance, where you can't get at it to use depilatory, is hard to take. Even the most elementary body functions become fantastically complicated. And the result is always shattered nerves. But the terrific breach in the hull made it necessary. Only the Control deck was truly airtight after the collision, and the men were quarreling continuously about who should get the long watches there. Then too, every time the hatch was opened, new air had to be pumped in and the pressure tanks were dangerously low. That's why we called it imagination born of jangled nerves when we began to notice a difference in the way the ship handled. There was a certain recalcitrant sluggishness about her responses to course corrections, and she showed a marked preference for sunward trajectories rather than for the hyperbolics I computed Marsward. Yet we chose to ignore all the symptoms. On the fifteenth "day" after the collision, I was in the dorsal blister checking our position by means of bubble-tetrant and star shots. Mars already had begun to show a definite disc, and I felt better than I had in days. My flight of fancy was short-lived.