He emerged into the swirling silver mist and turned right to follow the line of the looming black metal cliff of the control building. The crunch of his boots in the powder ice sounded faint and far away, through the thin vapors. Where the wall ended he continued walking slowly in a straight line, out into the open area and toward the edge of the base. Phantom shapes of steel emerged and disappeared in the silent shadows around him. The gloom ahead grew darker as inlands of diffuse light passed by on either side. The ice began sloping upward. Irregular patches of naked, upthrusting rock became more frequent. He walked on as if in a trance.

Pictures from the past rolled by before his mind's eye: a boy, reading books, shut away in the upstairs bedroom of a London slum . . . a youth, pedaling a bicycle each morning through the narrow streets of Cambridge. The people he had been were no more real than the people he would become. All through his life he had been moving on, never standing still, always in the process of changing from something he had been to something he would be. And beyond every new world, another beckoned. And always the faces around him were unfamiliar ones—they drifted into his life like the transient shadows of the rocks that now moved toward him from the mists ahead. Like the rocks, for a while the people seemed to exist and take on form and substance, before slipping by to dissolve into the shrouds of the past behind him, as if they had never been. Forsyth-Scott, Felix Borlan, and Rob Gray had already ceased to exist. Would Caldwell, Danchekker, and the rest soon fade away to join them? And what new figures would materialize out of the unknown worlds lying hidden behind the veils of time ahead?

He realized with some surprise that the mists around him were getting brighter again; also, he could suddenly see farther. He was climbing upward across an immense ice field, now smooth and devoid of rocks. The light was an eerie glow, permeating evenly through mists on every side as if the fog itself were luminous. He climbed higher. With every step the horizon of his vision broadened further, and the luminosity drained from the surrounding mist to concentrate itself in a single patch that second by second grew brighter above his head. And then he was looking out over the top of the fog bank. It was just a pocket, trapped in the depression of the vast basin in which the base had been built; it had no doubt been sited there to shorten the length of the shaft needed to reach the Ganymean ship. The slope above him finished in a long, rounded ridge not fifty feet beyond where he stood. He changed direction slightly to take the steeper incline that led directly to the summit of the ridge. The last tenuous wisps of whiteness fell away.