"As a matter of fact, it's silly of me to ask," she went on. "I wouldn't understand. I don't even know what 'pretty' means, although I have a dim idea what 'ugly' does. Color is another enigma to me. Somebody once told me it's like a smell, but when I get a bad cold, I can't remember what smells are like. It's like not being able to think of the word 'bubble' when your mouth is wide open--you think of '_Ah_-uh.'" "I'll tell you one thing about yourself," Phil said. "You don't look as though...." "As though I was blind?" "Correct. And it's incredible the way you get around. You never bump into anything, and you look people right in the eye when they talk to you." "They say it's hearing faint echoes from an obstacle--like a bat. Personally, I _feel_ the wall in front of me. I admit when my ears are stopped up I can't hear the wall, but I'm not so sure that's a convincing proof. It's the same with pit vipers--some smart investigator discovered that when you plug up their little heat-detecting organs--I guess those are the pits--they can't locate warm prey in the dark. Conversely, in the dark and not plugged up, they will strike at a hot-water bottle." "Sounds pretty convincing to me," Phil said, and went back to the electron microscope. "Tush," Katherine said. "How about people not wanting to smoke in the dark? Does that prove that the sense of taste depends on sight? _I_ smoke. In fact, you might bring me a cigarette and an ashtray. The only reason most blind people don't smoke is they're afraid of fire." She took the cigarette Phil brought her. "Thanks." "Aren't you afraid of fire?" he asked. "Of course not. I can detect a match flame at fifteen feet." "You ought to go to Duke University sometime and have Rhine take a look at you." "I did. All he said was 'Hmm,' and I joined the other statistics." There was silence for a while, interrupted at one point by a muffled "Damn!" from Phil peering into the electron microscope, and the warm sun lay across Katherine's lap. Finally he straightened up and switched off the current. "Well, it's there, all right," he said, and got up and went to the couch and sat at her feet. "What is?" "The red shift." "Aren't you confusing things?" she said. "You're not in the observatory now, Buster; this is the lab. I thought the red shift was the recession of the distant galaxies ... whatever 'red' is." "Quite right, Holmes. However, in this case, it's the recession of the not-so-distant atoms. They are small-sized solar systems, too, in a way, and when I say 'red' I mean something I can only infer mathematically, because I'm not dealing with light in the ordinary sense." "You mean they're _receding_?" "Only in this context," he said. "Motion is length over time; in this case, it's length over hyper-time, so they're still here in the lab." "I'm relieved to hear it," she said. "However, I should think they'd be receding into tomorrow."