Saxon followed her into the passage, switched off the lights, closed the door softly behind him. "I don't believe it!" said Ileth. "I don't want to believe it." Her fine patrician features were paper white, making her black lashes and eyebrows stand out like heavy strokes of a crayon. Her lips were bloodless. Saxon shook his head in bewilderment. "Couldn't you read her mind?" asked Ileth. "She had the most perfect mental barrier I've ever encountered. I couldn't read a thing. Only...." "Only what?" "Nothing," he said abruptly, shaking his massive shoulders as if to free them from a burden. "Nothing. I think we'd better keep our mouths shut about this too. If we went around telling what we've seen, they'd throw us in the psychopathic ward." Ileth shuddered. "Maybe it was an hallucination," she suggested. "Maybe we're nutty as a fruit cake, I hope." V "You've been through the Little Death before," said Saxon. He and Murdock, the T.I.S. agent, were in the control room, Murdock's eye glued to the scanner. "What's it like, Murdock?" The gaunt, frosty T.I.S. agent took his eyes from the scanner, faced Saxon. "Not so bad," he replied laconically. "I've heard it's a pretty rugged experience." Murdock allowed himself a tight smile. "That depends on how active a social consciousness you have. You're a non-Newtonian physicist. You know the Pachner conception of the space-time continuum better than I do. Villainowski's stellar drive inverts the Newtonian concept that a vehicle travels through space during a passage of time. It operates through time during a passage of space. "Yes, yes," Saxon interrupted impatiently. "But the effects of the time field.... What do you experience while the ship is in the time field?" "That's the Little Death," replied Murdock in a dry voice, "though the name is misleading. Actually you experience a segment of your own life, either the past, the future, or the present. As Villainowski would explain it, time is co-existent, while in the time field our lives are spread out around us, but because we're equipped with three-dimensional sense organs we're restricted to a single series of episodes anywhere along our life span." Saxon frowned and said, "In other words, it's just as if we returned to the past and relived some incident that occurred to us before?" "Right. Or into the future and experienced something that hasn't happened yet." Saxon's frown deepened. "But what's so rugged about that?" "Nothing," rejoined Murdock dryly, "if you've lived an exemplary life. It's not pleasant, though, to live over and over again a period when you committed murder say, or were terribly frightened, or even did some little thing that you've been trying your best to forget since." Saxon, caught a brief mental flash from the T.I.S. agent, as he shoved the picture of a girl with pretty Slavic features out of his mind.