wanted suddenly to run.
He struggled in panic against the invisible bonds of peace and comfort which were so reluctant to let him go. His determination to be free was the fierce and frenzied one of utter fear. Flailing his arms as if against some material foe, he managed to stumble down from the ramp, to one side of the doorway where the green light would not reach him.
Exhausted from the herculean struggle, he slumped to the floor. A soft, warm blackness was settling over him, and he was powerless to fend it off. But he knew that he was safe, and the satisfaction which he felt was increased by the radiation which he had absorbed, so that when he finally swooped into unconsciousness, it was amidst a thunderous, victorious singing.
NELLON'S next sensations were curious ones. He seemed to awaken in another realm. It was a vast and formless place with no distinguishable feature or color, but it was curiously sentient, pulsing with awesome possibilities.
Now, as though stirred by his reflection upon it, the nebulous stuff began to writhe. And then, taking shape from the formless jumble of thoughts in his subconscious, a dream-world began to grow. Bits were added here, others discarded there, but every compartment in the storehouse of his mind contributed something. And all assembled in accordance with the pattern Nellon had fashioned in two and a half years of brooding. Finally his dream paradise was complete to the last detail of his hopes and imaginings.
It was the world which he had built around Laura taken on an immaterial, but to him nantheless real, life. There was Laura and there was himself. And there was the complete bliss for which he had planned Big Tim's murder to achieve.
He became aware of a change. The outlines of his world were dimming, dissolving, fading. Even Laura, radiantly lovely, was beginning to blur before his eyes.
In horror he sought to clutch the evaporating structure to him and stabilize it once again. But it slipped through his fingers like an impalpable mist. Before he was fully alive to it, his dream Eden was gone, and he was back in that formless void in which he had found himself. And even that was thinning.
Nellon awoke. He looked around for Laura and that idyllic dream land in which they had loved. But only the great, green cylinder with its flaming globe and the vast room beyond met his gaze.
Nellon climbed to his feet. With the action, he became aware that he felt wonderfully refreshed and stimulated. He looked around for Big Tim, then he remembered. Avoiding the open doorway through which the rays still poured, he peered through the green wall. Big Tim was lying there on the floor within. He was very still in his thermalloy suit.
Nellon began a chain of reasoning. As it progressed, there went with it a rising tide of exultation.
As long as Big Tim remained there under the influence of the globe, he would remain unconscious, living, perhaps, a dream as real and vivid as his own had been. It would be just as though Big Tim were dead. None of the expedition members knew of the doorway through which he and Big Tim had entered. With the almost continuous storms which raged on Titan, the door would soon become covered again. Ages might pass before a chance accident revealed it once more.
He, Nellon, could go back to the ship
