For this was not Wing IV. The sky told him that.
The gray murk of the humanoid planet was gone, and the sky above the low dark cliffs and the far black hills was a dead and utter black, scattered with only a few tiny oval blobs of gray mist.
Towering against the dark, above the foot of that dead valley, was a tall, leaning dome of pale white splendor, a remote incredible spray of diamond glints frozen motionless.
For a moment he merely stared, shivering and bewildered, shrinking from the savage attack of the cold.
For he stood barefoot on the icy sharpness of the gravel, clad only in the thin gray pajamas in which his mechanical keeper had clad him.
The cruel cold sucked out his breath and seared his skin, and he stood blank with his stunned perplexity until he felt the tug of a child's anxious hand.
"Oh, Dr. Forester!"
Jane Carter was crouched beside him on the river-worn gravel, no longer a creature of the machines.
Her huge frightened eyes could see again, and that serene cold smile of far forgetfulness was gone.
"I'm so cold!"
She shivered against him. "Please take me out of the cold."
"But how can I do that" - he shuddered beneath a crushing wonderment - "when I don't even know where we are?"
He found that he couldn't really speak, because that empty cold had taken all his breath.
His throat was dry and his lungs were burning and his lips too stiff to move.
He made no sound - and heard none, for this dark place was utterly dead.
Yet the child seemed to understand him, for a new dismay was sick in her eyes.
"Don't you know?"
She frowned up at him, her thin face stiff with pain, and he realized that he hadn't heard her actual voice at all.
"You ought to know," she said. "
'Cause you took me away from the black machines, and you brought us both out here.
All I did was show you where to come."
"No - that couldn't be!" He shook his head dazedly.
"Because just a moment ago I was in a cage, waiting for that platinum brain to take hold of me.
I don't remember doing anything at all.
I didn't even hope to get away, and I certainly don't know where we are."
"I know that." She clung close to him, her unvoiced thought more rapid than speech.
"This is the cold, far place Mr. White used to send me to pick up palladium nuggets.
I used to hurry right back to the cave, to keep from freezing - but now we can't go there.
The black machines would take us again if we did." Her anxious fingers were icy in his own.
"Please - where can we go?"
But Forester was mute, swaying to a numbed understanding.
He remembered those frosty nuggets of alluvial palladium Jane had brought back from the gravels of a sunless planet that was cold to the absolute zero, and now he saw the terrible meaning of the starless dark and that tall arch of diamond dust beyond the black and barren hills.
The merciless, still cold sank into him more piercingly.
For now he knew that he and Jane had been somehow marooned on this lifeless planet lost outside their native universe of stars.
Those tiny oval blots against the dead and empty dark were other island universes, remote beyond knowledge.
And that tall plume was the edge of their own galaxy, luminous with light which must have left its splendid mist of suns a long thousand centuries before the first philosopher of the mother world ever dreamed of seeking the one eternal reality behind the multiplex flow of seeming things.
"It's so awful cold," the frightened child was sobbing.
"Please, can't you do - anything?
I can't keep us alive much longer here without breathing.
And I don't know anywhere safe to go.
Please, can't you-"
Blankly, Forester shook his head.
Because it must have taken a long billion years, he thought, for this stray atom of a world to drift so far through the extragalactic dark.
It must have been time beyond imagining since some lost sun had warmed these old black hills, since vanished waters had washed this frozen gravel.
This world was dead.
No day would ever break the black-and-silver splendor of this savage, soundless night.
Nothing could live long here.
His hands were empty and his weak knee throbbed and the cold of the gravel burned the bare soles of his feet like something very hot.
Peering at the black frown of those worn cliffs, he dropped his thin shoulders hopelessly.
Nothing at all could live at the absolute zero.