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mausoleum—through the looking glass. Everything—even, as Mauris discovered, the parting in his own hair—had been reversed. He knew, without feeling the necessity to confirm it by exploration, that he was the last man alive. The Santa Maria, with the sole exception of its Captain, was maimed entirely by the dead.
    “Poor devils,” said Captain Mauris aloud. “Poor devils, they couldn’t take the stillness. It made them too tired— dead tired!” The sound of his own voice, normal now, gave him greater grasp on reality.
    With ponderous, heavy movements, like a drunken man, he undid the straps of his contour berth and straggled wearily to his feet. He went across to Kobler, feeling for his pulse with a forlorn hope.
    “Dead tired,” repeated Mauris slowly. He gazed ruefully at Kobler’s pale face, set in a last frown of concentration. “ There are more things in heaven and earth ,  Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy .”
    Mauris felt neither regret nor satisfaction. There was no joy in knowing that he had the final word, that Kobler would never laugh that one away.
    Presently he pulled himself together and made a cautious tour of the ship. He was as methodical as if it was a monthly routine inspection, and checked everything from the conditioner to the recycling plant. The ship, he noted ironically, was in perfect condition—but for two small details: the planetary and stellar drives were completely wrecked. Apart from the fact that the landing retard and auxiliary brake rockets were intact, the Santa Maria was at the mercy of normal gravity fields.
    There were only two reasonable possibilities. She might coast merrily in the void forever, or drop eventually into a sun. The alternative was too improbable for consideration,  for the chances of falling into the gravity field of an hospitable planet were several billion billion to one.
    Finally Captain Mauris was confronted with the task he had been subconsciously shirking. Steeling himself against a paralyzing reluctance, he climbed up into the astrodome and looked at the stars.
    He did not need star charts to tell him that this was not the home galaxy. As he gazed at the sharp, unfamiliar patterns, an already tight band seemed to constrict around his heart. . . . Perhaps Kobler had succeeded. Perhaps the galaxy M 81 had been entered by a terrene ship for the first time. . . . Much good it would do die United Space Corporation!
    With a grim smile, Mauris recalled that final paragraph of the ship’s articles. If the Master should satisfy himself, and the authorized scientists concerned, that the danger factor is sufficient ... It was really very funny! Probably, sixteen hundred thousand light-years away on a speck of cosmic dust, the Field Testing Executive had already set up their officious Court of Inquiry to consider possible reasons for the loss of their experimental ship.
    Then suddenly he realized that if the Santa Maria had indeed reached M 81, the planet Earth was not only sixteen hundred thousand light-years away, it was also sixteen hundred thousand years ago.
    He had a sudden image of the Field Testing Executive with apelike faces, sitting and jabbering pompously around a mud pool in some prehistoric steamy jungle. ... And Mauris laughed. He laughed loudly, raucously. He laughed until he cried—until weariness, in a sudden triumph, toppled him senseless on the deck. And there he lay, sleeping like a child whose nightmares materialize only when he is awake.
    He never knew how long he slept. He was eventually wakened by a sharp, agonizing pain in his stomach. At last, through a fog of bewilderment, he diagnosed it as hunger. He staggered along to the mess deck and operated the food delivery controls. A minute and a half later he pulled a nicely roasted chicken, complete with potatoes and green peas, from the electronic cooker. He ate ravenously and followed it up with cheese and biscuits, coffee and