He raised his head and looked at the painting, and the tree still glowed softly with its inner light, and from within it came a sound, a faint thudding sound, the sound of running feet. The shout came again and the man was running down the path inside the painting. A man who ran and waved his arms and shouted. The man was Nevin. Nevin was in the painting, running down the path, his padding feet raising little puffs of dust along the pebbled path. West raised the pistol and his hand was trembling so that the muzzle weaved back and forth and then described a circle. "Buck fever," said West. He said it through chattering teeth. For now he knew ... no he knew the answer. He put up his other hand and grasped the wrist of the hand that held the gun and the muzzle steadied. West gritted his teeth together to stop their chattering. His thumb went down against the activator and held it there and the flame from the gun's muzzle spat out and mushroomed upon the painting. Mushroomed until the entire canvas was a maelstrom of blue brilliance that hissed and roared and licked with hungry tongues. Slowly the tree ran together, as if one's eyes might have blurred and gone slightly out of focus. The landscape dimmed and jigged and ran in little wavering lines. And through the wavering lines could be seen a twisted and distorted man whose mouth seemed open in a howl of rage. But there was no sound of howling, just the purring of the gun. With a tired little puff the mushrooming brilliance and the painting were gone and the gun's pencil of flame was hissing through an empty steel frame still filled with tiny glowing wires, spattering against the wall behind it. West lifted his thumb and silence clamped down upon him, clamped down and held the room ... as it held leagues of space stretching on all sides. "No painting," said West. An echo seemed to run all around the room. "No painting," the echo said, but West knew it was no echo, just his brain clicking off endlessly the words his lips had said. "No painting," the echo said, but West was in some other world, some other place, some _otherwhere_. A machine that broke down the spacetime continuum or whatever it was that separated Man's universe from other, stranger universes. No wonder the fruit upon the tree had looked like the fruit upon the table. No wonder he had thought that he heard the wind in the leaves. West stood up and moved to the wall behind him. He found a tumbler and thumbed it up and the lights came on. In the light the smashed other-world machine was a sagging piece of wreckage. Cartwright's body lay in the center of the room. A chittering thing ran across the floor and ducked into the dark beneath a table. A grinning face peeped out from behind a chair and squalled at West in cold-boned savagery.