Hunt was dozing in what felt like a soft and very comfortable armchair. He was relaxed and refreshed, as if he had been there for some time. The memory of his experience was still vivid, but it lingered only as something that he regarded in a detached, almost academically curious, kind of way. The terror had gone. The air around him smelt fresh and slightly scented, and subdued music was playing in the background. After a few seconds it registered as a Mozart string quartet. What kind of insanity was he part of now?

He opened his eyes, straightened up, and looked around. He was in an armchair, and the chair was part of an ordinary-looking room, furnished in contemporary style with another, similar chair, reading desk, a large wooden table in the center, a side-table near the door set with an ornate vase of roses, and a thick carpet of dark brown pile that blended fairly well with the predominantly orange and brown decor. There was a single window behind him, covered by heavy drapes that were closed and billowing gently in the breeze coming through from the outside. He looked down at himself and found that he was wearing a dark blue, open-necked shirt and light gray slacks. There was nobody else in the room.

After a few seconds he got up, found that he felt fine, and strolled across the room to part the drapes curiously. Outside was a pleasant, summery scene that could have been part of any major city on Earth. Tall buildings gleamed clean and white in the sun, familiar trees and open green spaces beckoned, and Hunt could see the curve of a wide river immediately below, an older-style bridge with a railed parapet and rounded arches, familiar models of groundcars moving along the roadways, and processions of airmobiles in the sky. He let the drapes fall back as they had been and glanced at his watch, which seemed to be working normally. Less than twenty minutes had passed since the "Boeing" touched down at McClusky. Nothing made sense.

He turned his back to the window and thrust his hands into his pockets while he thought back and tried to remember something that had been puzzling him even before he stepped out of the spacecraft. It had been something trivial, something that had barely registered in the few moments that had elapsed between Calazar’s brief appearance inside the craft and Hunt’s first glimpse of the stupefying scene that had greeted him outside just before everything went crazy. It had been something to do with Calazar.

And then it came to him. In the Shapieron , ZORAC had interpreted between Ganymeans and humans by means of earpiece and throat-mike devices that provided normal-sounding synthesized voices, but which did not synchronize with the facial movements of the original speakers. But Calazar had spoken without any such aids, and apparently quite effortlessly. What made it all the more peculiar was that the Ganymean larynx produced a low, guttural articulation and was utterly incapable of reproducing a human pitch even approximately. So how had Calazar done it, and without looking like a badly dubbed movie at that?

Well, he wasn’t going to get nearer any answers by standing here, he decided. The door looked normal enough, and there was only one way to find out whether it was locked or not. He was halfway toward it when it opened and Lyn walked in, looking cool and comfortable in a short-sleeved pullover top and slacks. He stopped dead and stared at her while part of him braced itself instinctively for her to hurl herself across the room and throw her arms around his neck while sobbing in true heroine tradition. Instead she stopped just inside the door and stood casually inspecting the room.

"Not bad," she commented. "The carpet’s too dark, though. It should be a more red rust." The carpet promptly changed to a more red rust.

Hunt stared at it for a few seconds, blinked, and then looked up numbly. "How the hell did you do that?" he asked, looking down again to make sure that he hadn’t imagined it. He hadn’t.

She looked surprised. "It’s VISAR. It can do anything. Haven’t you been talking to it?" Hunt shook his head. Lyn’s face became puzzled. "If you didn’t know, how come you’re wearing different clothes? What happened to your Nanook outfit?"

Hunt could only shake his head. "I don’t know. I don’t know how I got here, either." He stared down at the red rust carpet again. "Amazing. . . . I think I could use a drink."

"VISAR," Lyn said in a slightly raised voice. "How about a Scotch, straight, no ice?" A glass half filled with an amber liquid materialized from nowhere on the table beside Hunt. Lyn picked it up and offered it to him nonchalantly. He reached out hesitantly to touch it with a fingertip, at the same time half hoping that it wouldn’t be there. It was. He took the glass unsteadily from her hand and tested it with a sip, then downed a third of the remainder in one gulp. The warmth percolated smoothly down through his chest and after a few moments had worked a small miracle of its own. Hunt drew a long breath, held it for a few seconds, then exhaled it slowly but still shakily.

"Cigarette?" Lyn inquired. Hunt nodded without thinking. A cigarette, already lit, appeared between his fingers. Don’t even ask about it, he told himself.

It all had to be some kind of an elaborate hallucination. How, when, why, or where he didn’t know, but it seemed that he had little choice for the moment but to go along with it. Perhaps this whole preliminary interlude had been staged by the Thuriens to provide a period of adjustment and familiarization or something like that. If so, he could see their point. This was like dumping an alchemist from the Middle Ages into the middle of a computerized chemical plant. Thurien, or wherever this was, was going to take some getting used to, he realized. Having decided that much, he felt that probably he was over the biggest hurdle already. But how had Lyn managed to adapt so quickly? Maybe there were disadvantages to being a scientist that he hadn’t thought about before.

When he looked up and studied her face, he could see now that her superficial calm was being forced in order to control an underlying bemusement not far short of his own. Her mind was temporarily blocking itself off from the full impact of what it all meant, probably in a way similar to the delayed shock that was a common reaction to exceptionally painful news such as the death of a close relative. He could detect no sign of her having been through anything as traumatic as he had. At least that was something to be thankful for.

He moved over to one of the chairs and turned to perch himself on an arm. "So. . . . how did you get here?" he asked.

"Well, I was right behind you on the gravity conveyor, or whatever you’d call it, from that crazy place that we all walked out into from the plane, and then. . ." She broke off as she caught the perplexed expression creeping across Hunt’s face. "You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?"

He shook his head. "What gravity conveyor?"

Lyn frowned at him uncertainly. "We all walked out of the plane?. . . . There was this big bright place with everything upside down and sideways?. . . Something like whatever lifted us up the stairs picked us all up and took us off along one of the tubes-a big yellow-and-white one?. . ." She was listing the items slowly and intoning them as questions, all the while watching his face intently as if trying to help him identify the point at which he had lost the thread, but it was obvious already that she had experienced something quite different right from the beginning.

He waved a hand in front of his face. "Okay, skip the details. How did you get separated from the others?"

Lyn started to reply and then stopped suddenly and frowned, as if realizing for the first time that her own recollections were by no means as complete as she had thought. "I’m not sure . . ." She hesitated. "Somehow I ended up . . . I don’t know where it was. . . . There was this big organization chart-colored boxes with names in them, and lines of who reports to who-that had to do with some crazy kind of United States Space Force." Her face grew more confused as she replayed the memory in her mind. "There were lots of UNSA names on it that I knew, but with ranks and things that didn’t make any sense. Gregg’s name was there as a general, and mine was right underneath as a major." She shook her head in a way that told Hunt not to bother asking her to explain it.