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fabric. It was wound around the waist, with the trailing end brought up between the legs and tucked firmly inside the waistband. When one was old enough to be permitted to dream, one was given either the toga and thongs of a man, or the robe of a woman. When death came, when the dead one was slipped, naked, into the mouth of the oval tube to speed down into unknown blackness, the clothing was saved. He had seen the room where it was stored in shining piles that reached to the highest point a man could touch.
    He stood up, took a deep breath, tightened the hand at his waist and walked solemnly up the next motionless track. And the next, and the next. He tired of the steep climb and rested, realizing that he had lost count. The corridors down which he glanced had a sameness about them, and a silence.
    At last he came to a track which moved upwards, its neighboring track moving downward, silently and perfectly. He stepped onto the track which carried him up, wondering how long it had been since other bare feet had stopped there.
    Up and up and up. The familiar things were a frightening distance below him. But fears were lulled by the familiar silent motion of the track, which created a wind to touch his face.
    With the sudden shock of a blow, he saw that at last there was no track to carry him higher, and thus no level above the one he had reached. The corridor was smaller than the others. He fought against a fear that commanded him to turn quickly and descend. The silence was theworst. No pad of feet against the body-warm floors. No distant voices. No sound of children. Just silence and the glow of the walls.
    This, then, was the top of the world, the top of eternity, the summit of all. Fear faded into exaltation and he felt larger than life itself. He, Raul Kinson, had gone, alone, to the top of the world. The sneer at the others formed in his mind. He stuck his chest out and carried his chin high. The old ones said there was no limit to the world—that the silent levels went upward into infinity, that those who slid down the tube of death fell forever, turning slowly through the blackness, until the end of time.
    He walked down the corridor. It curved slightly. He stopped. There was a picture, a large picture, at the end of the corridor. He knew of pictures. There were thousands of them on the eighteenth level and no one really understood them.
    He walked to the picture with the contempt of familiarity. He walked close to its oddly shining surface. A low sound bubbled in his throat, the darkness rushed over him and he had no feeling of impact as he fell.
    He struggled back to consciousness and knelt and looked at the picture again. He knew that it was no picture. It was a revelation. It was a truth so fantastic that he heard, on his lips, the meaningless sounds that infants make. He knew that from this day forward, he would be apart from all the others who had not seen this, who did not share his concept.
    Outside of the levels, beyond the walls that glowed, everyone was taught that there was nothingness. Often he had gone to sleep trying to visualize “nothingness.” It was all a lie.
    All of the levels were located in an enormous, frightening room. The ceiling, impossibly high, was a deep purple color, with hard shining dots of light in it, and one enormous round deep-red light that hurt his eyes when he looked directly at it. The floor of the room was tan and brown and gray. The most horrible aspect of the enormousroom was his inability to see the walls. They were beyond vision, in itself a new concept. It dizzied him to stare down at the remote floor. Far off, to the right, the floor was humped up into a jagged series of mounds much higher than the level of his eye. And, in the foreground, six objects towered, standing neatly in a row. The glow of the round red light made them look silvery. The longer he stared, the more accustomed he became to perspective and the more accurately he could assess the height of those six