"Good. You did that all yourself, I think now you may do that without my help. But we waste time. Rise with me!" An invisible tentacle touched him, flooded him with power. He rose high into the cloudless blue skies of Aava's planet, soaring sunward. Beneath him the red grasslands and grey rock spread out in vast splendor. Soon now he was high enough to see the great globe that was the planet in all its entirety, slowly revolving. Out in space, in the vast distances between the suns, he floated bodiless. The planet receded, became a dot. "Now we will go back, far in Time." "How?" "Think and will it. Your astral self, your _ka_ or twin-soul, is a creature of mind, not matter." Thor thought, hanging there in black space. And, as he thought, with each bit of energy he threw into his will and into his brain, there was a change. The suns and the planets were moving. They sped like balls batted across a net by hundreds of players. They slid in ancient grooves, rotating and retreating, going back the paths of their orbits. A ball of raging fire looped at them. Thor paused in instinctive dismay; he sought to turn and flee, dreading the vast sun coming at him. [Illustration: _He sought to turn and flee._] "Move not. It can not harm you." He was in the midst of a roaring red inferno, feeling nothing of its annihilating heat. An instant later it was gone, raging gustily down the tracks of Time. Thor stared. There were fewer stars now, only a couple of hundred of parsecs away. This universe was retreating away from him. "We must follow!" "No need. They will return." "But an expanding universe means that it will be retreating now, going back to ultimate beginnings--" "Our universe--the universe of Earth and Flormaseron--is an expanding universe. But here, in Aava's worlds, there is no room for expansion. This is a finite universe, gigantic, but rimmed with some strange force that keeps it separate from our universe. "Here the suns and planets rotate around each other, but at the same time they revolve inside this space. They traverse this great bubble thousands of times through the ages. Watch. You will see them return." Thor hung there, in utter blackness. And then, far and faint, in the opposite direction from which the suns had gone, they came. At first they were pinpoints, then dots. They came nearer, great fiery orbs. "Two hundred million years have passed, Thor Masterson. Let us drop down, toward the planet of Aava." There was only one vast desert of sand facing them, as they hovered above the surface of the slowly revolving planet. Dunes a hundred miles high, whipped with savage and incessant winds. They saw sandstorms that were titanic in their fury. "Sand," thought Thor. "Mile after mile of silicon dioxide." "Drop down. Go through the sand." Grayish granules all around him, bringing the sensation of suffocation until he grew used to it. The gray darkened and grew black as pitch.