He had called it--nowhere. This wasn't anything like that. This was really _some_where. Soft lights bathed him like water. Shadows seemed to shift and sway and there was silver in the light, dusted with golden motes. He thought desperately. "Where is this? What has happened?" "This is Death," the voice that had no face or form answered. "That is what you term it, in the lower stage reality from which you have come. There are other ways of going through the barrier, but death is the sure and the ordinary one. Many come through, in many ways--" Stevens tried to understand, and he knew that he could not. He tried to see his present form, his present meaning. There was nothing tangible. He drifted. He was light and sound perhaps, movement perhaps. He was part of something greater and far more complex than his undeveloped powers of perception could absorb. Stevens thought. "You mean--I'm--Dead. I mean--that I'm not living now?" The thought answered him. It wasn't a sequence of words, phrases, forming meaning. The entire answer was a part of him, immediately. "You call it death. Actually you are more alive, you have come through the barrier into what you call the fourth dimension. It is really but a broader awareness of a higher reality--" It didn't mean much to Stevens. The unknown, the intangible--it sent a chill through his consciousness. Pain hit him. He winced. Light roiled, irritation eddied like muddy streaks in a clear stream. A bluish haze spread like staining ink through the clouds of brilliance. Dark cracks spread like lines through colored glass. Stevens felt an icy wind. He seemed to swirl inchoate through a forest of wildly irritated leaves and branches. The thought came to him, weakly, through distance that was more than mere distance, through barriers of space and realms of time. It came to him weakly, and it began to fade. "Everything that was, that is, or will be, we are conscious of here in this higher stage of reality. All must come through, and there is never again contact with the lower stage, the third dimension of perception. The matrix is universal, eternal, and it is set and unchanging." Stevens' mind screamed. "But I'm returning--help me, I don't want to go back. I want to stay, to stay--" "You are John Stevens--" the voice, the thought, drifted to him from what seemed infinite spaces. "Yes, yes--" "There is a distortion, you do not understand. Someday you will. You are premature. The pattern is rigid, and everything has its set moment of alteration. This distortion, I cannot explain. We are not perfect here. There is yet a higher reality, and a higher one still, and the stages are infinite. But you will be back, John Stevens. Soon. Very soon." "When--when?"