"I think he's desperate," I said. "I think he's learned all he can. He's learned what the nearest Earthly equivalents to Veldish things are. And he's learned that all Earth can give him nothing closer. I don't see how he could do better. Even he. You cannot make apples of cabbages. But he wants to get home--you know he wants so much to leave here and get home--and now he's desperate, and is going to try making a new transporter out of materials nothing like those in the one that broke and marooned him here." "And it won't function?" Charpantier asked. "There is that risk. But why shouldn't he try? What's insane in that?" "I fear it might work. I fear it might work in ways a transporter should not." And I shivered, for if I say something I feel it, and I do not feel anything I don't believe is right. I have been wrong, but not often ... or perhaps I forget. Charpantier smiled. "How should a Veld transporter work?" "That's not the point!" I cried at Charpantier's obstinacy in being Charpantier. "I don't have to know. The Veld has to know, and be insane enough to try something different. Look--" I said, searching, being my own kind of man, now, and letting the words come straight from the images in my head. "Assume a man. Assume a man stranded on an island, for years. Assume he has ways of realizing his heart's desire, if only he can find the things to work with. But it's a small island. And while it's a good island how can it give a marooned man not only comfort but heart's desire? He searches. He perhaps send messengers, if he himself cannot penetrate the jungle; such messengers as he can command. And, in the end, after years, he knows he cannot have exactly what he wants. But he can have something very near it. So, in the end, he takes a rag, and a bone, and a hank of hair--" "And makes a woman?" Charpantier laughed. "If he fails, what of it?" "But if he succeeds, Charpantier! If he _succeeds_!" Couldn't he see? "What sort of woman?" Charpantier looked at me for a moment, but I hadn't made him see. He saw only me, and I had taken up his time without delivering value. So he chastised me. "The Veld made me and you. Are you dissatisfied?" He had that trick, Charpantier. If you tried to give him a problem he couldn't solve, he gave you a greater problem of your own, to add to the one you already carried. I picked up my bag and followed him up the hill to the Foundation, where the Veld timelessly waited. It was dusk, and as I walked I turned my eyes up to the stars. One eye was larger than the other, and a different color. My nose sat askew on my lumpen face. Though Charpantier was a hunchback, and lacked a finger, still he was a handsome hunchback. But I, whom the Veld had made second, with Charpantier's example, was merely whole. And from my eyes, tears. * * * * * We entered the Foundation. It had been erected around the Veld, when he first came and there were men who could question.