on the window, and his sight travelled easily over the architectural fairyland. Sparkling search-beams swept across the sky, throwing an occasional glint as they slid across a jetcar or a stratoplane. A thousand lights of a thousand hues twinkled in the city below. Even here on the one-hundred-eightieth floor he could hear the throbbing roar of its ceaseless activity. This was the foremost of the cities of man, yet somewhere in that city was a man who was … not quite human.
Brent had the partial answer, he was sure of that. He had found the missing factor in one of his own paintings. It was the only one he was even slightly pleased with. He had turned it out in nine solid hours of work, one of the “dangerous exposures” the doctors talked about. He had it propped on the video console, a stark vista of Mare Imbrium in the afternoon—moon time. It was a canvas touched with the raw grandeur of eternal space. It had a burning quality that reacted on human sight. An alien landscape seen