Throughout that five years he had loomed amid the cascading cosmic energies like some creation from Dante’s Inferno, clothed in his huge insulated and protective suit with the immense gauntlets and cowl-like helmet. At other times he had not been so cautious, particularly when the manipulation of some delicate and sensitive parts of the apparatus had demanded that his hands be absolutely unencumbered. Whether or not the cosmic radiation in which he had been exposed during these periods had done him any harm he did not know. Certainly he felt no worse physically, so he assumed that all was well. During these five years he had also made tests of his bodily energy and had found that the life energy absorption that he gave himself at regular intervals were apparently keeping him at a more or less constant level. There was little if any breakdown of cellular material that would have proclaimed advancing age. He was, as near as he could tell, living at a permanent twenty three to twenty four years of age.
