"Well," he said, enjoying himself, "I'll make a few more trips with you, but that's all I'll promise." "I accept your promises," she said. He felt a tiny shiver rise up in him. Suppose her normspace form was even more hideous than her hyperspace form, which of course, was no longer hideous to him. Would his nerves be strong enough to bear it? * * * * * He held his breath as the vibrations began to slow down, the grays shimmering into substance, taking on all the colors of the rainbow and then flowing into one basic roseate hue. Bit by bit, the planes and shapes began to coalesce into the shape of.... A woman. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. A woman next to whom even the dream of Lyddy paled into thin air. And, momentarily, he became the Len Mattern of fifteen years back, standing there with his mouth agape. "But you said you'd be a monster...." "To my people, Mattern," she smiled, "this form is as monstrous as ours is to your people. You change into our doubles in hyperspace; we change into yours in normspace. Had you kept the continuity of tradition that we have, you would know what we have always known--that xhind and human are different aspects of the same race. That is why you fear us, and we do not fear you." _Of course_, he thought. _How else could they understand us so well? How else could they find logic in our illogic and be able to condition us according to our human natures?_ And he smiled to think that all objection to the xhindi from the social angle was invalid. Monsters they might be, but not non-humans. "Once I thought this appearance was monstrous, Mattern," the mbretersha went on, in the sweet voice which suited her now, "because I thought you and your kind were, though forms of our race, monstrous forms--not only without beauty, but without dignity or intelligence or compassion." "Maybe you were right," he said. "But since I have learned to know you and to--like you, I have come to realize that outward semblances are meaningless. I may appear one way in your universe, another way in mine, but I am the same I. If there is beauty--" and she gave what, in a lesser personage, would have been almost a giggle--"it is an inner beauty." Mattern could not agree with this premise. Although he had admired the mbretersha on Ferr, he felt quite differently toward her now, and because of no suddenly discovered inner beauty. "You'll stay this way in this universe then?" he asked. "It makes it so much more comfortable for me--than just a collection of shadows," he added hastily. "I will stay this way permanently while I am in your universe, Mattern," she told him, "if, in your turn, you will accept me as--as--" "As my shipmate," Mattern finished, "my kqyres. I have already done so." "Not merely as your _ship_mate." "As my--wife?" he blurted, wondering whether he was reading her mind or whether she was projecting so forcibly into his that he merely spoke her thoughts for her.