"And those men that come and go? And why we see no cities, no habitations where they live? Do you know that too?" "The Discoverer knows everything. I am the Discoverer. I live everywhere and nowhere. Or at least I did until the madness that is this queer space lapped out at me and brought me here, just as it did you. "To understand, you must think of the universe that you know as a big, big bubble. It is stable and steady. It has its star clusters with their space velocities and planetal orbits. Inside the big bubble everything is orderly--except one thing. "That one thing is a very tiny bubble. A sort of cancer, you might say. It obeys no laws. Its very space coordinates and vectors are different than ours. It is fluid--always in motion. Its space segments are so alien that they can reach right through ordinary space, annihilating distance, and seize upon objects." "But that's nonsensical," protested Thor. The Discoverer thought-beamed, "I said it is not space as we know space. Let me put it this way: the magnet can draw metal to it without touching the metal. So this space-cancer can attract objects by reaching out for them, drawing them toward it--through a sort of purplish mist--by some power of magnetic attraction." Thor made a sound as if he understood, and the Discoverer went on, "The segment of the rebel-universe came through the true universe, and touched you--" "Touched my house on the Midwestern campus." "Yes. It drew you within itself--" "But Karola and Slag! They came out of the air right in the middle of my living room." "They were in the magnetic pull, too. And where their space and this space met, was the middle of your living room." Thor looked at Karola, whose forehead was wrinkled in tiny furrows as she followed the thoughts of the Discoverer. Slag was off to the right, chasing a fat rabbit bounding ahead of him in terror. The Discoverer went on, "I sought entrance to this world many eons ago. It was one of the few spots in space I had never visited. Again and again I sought to enter, but its strangely twisted space-time continuum proved too much. Always I failed. "And then, when I was visiting--I am almost all brain and it is a habit of mine to roam a bit--I was visiting a planet of what you call the Magellanic Cluster when everything went blank and I found myself tugged through the purple space and landed here, stretched across a rock." Thor said, "You claim you can roam, mentally. Away from your body, that is." "Your world would call it astral projection, in which the spirit levitates from the body and crosses distance. The high-energy potential of the mind is used to dissociate the ethereal self, with which I include the mental self, from the matter of the body."