They trod the forest aisles of crystalline forms. There was light, of odd, gray, glary kind. A twilight, silvery, unreal as the trans-Lunar dreams of drugged poets. Songeen moved ahead slowly, making no effort to regain her clasp of his hand. Almost she seemed to avoid him, waiting until he almost overtook her, then skimming lightly away from him. Her slim, pale witchery was both taunt and challenge. She appeared to float rather than walk. One by one she dropped her clinging robes. She became part of the mad forest, part of its dreamy gray enchantments. Light grew steadily, and with it came more color, more magic, and more confusion of senses. The forest-forms assumed strange geometries. They stretched about him in endless vistas, blurring and transmuting as he watched. The dream-like cloudiness was fading from his perceptions. He caught dreadful hints now and then of new, unheard-of forms and colors, of unstable geometries as far beyond Einstein's as his were beyond Euclid's. Nothing was tangible or definite, and perhaps that was the secret. Nothing ever is. Fear wove a crystalline web about Newlin's throat, strangling. He halted and took stock. Ahead, Songeen waited, watching him, her figure a pale, elfin flame form against the shadowy mass of colored crystals. It was a forest of gemfires, and she was the purest jewel of the forest. Naked, alien, but-- * * * * * Why had he come here? His mind balked at backtracking. There was no going back. Perhaps he had already come too far. Was Songeen a vampire luring him into the hideous depths of this unknown place? He had been here before. It was like that awful illusion in the tower, but muted. How much did he perceive? How much was sheerest self-deception? Was he mad in the midst of awful sanity, or sane in the ultimate horror of lunacy? Her voice floated back to him, its sound the chiming crash of splintering glass. "Try not to change too much," she warned. "Change?" Even the word sounded strange to him, as she said it. He felt a swift surge of anger. There was no change in him--_none_! The tinkling bell-tones matched the swirl of his emotion and rose to jangling, tormented heights. It was shrill, maniacal tumult, that ranged upward and upward into octaves beyond sound. It was a rollicking, tortured insanity. Windbells chiming, jangled; tinkling, shimmering, exploding inside his brain. Windbells shattering in a hurricane of sound and ecstasy. With his fists, Newlin pounded at his bursting skull. Pain deadened perception, gave him a moment's relief. He was not changing, he shouted in loud defense. He was not!