Macurdy got slowly to his own. Hands grasped him, frog-marched him to the door of the hut and propelled him inside, where he fell sprawling on the floor. A moment later his sheepskin jacket was thrown in after him.

The floor he lay on was dirt. The only light came through the door, and through foot-square windows, one each in three of the walls. Beneath one of them was a trestle table with a bench on one side and a water bucket. The place smelled of wood smoke and damp ground.

An old man stood in a corner, and after a moment spoke to him-in American! "You're wearing Farside clothes!"

Macurdy got to hands and knees, then stood up, fingers exploring his face gingerly. "My name's Curtis Macurdy," he said. "From Washington County, Indiana originally, but I've been working at Neeley's Corners, in Missouri." He examined the old man, perhaps six feet tall once, now gaunt and somewhat bent, with one shoulder carried lower than the other. And bearded. Macurdy wasn't used to beards, hadn't seen half a dozen beards in his life.

The old man sat down as if weighted by Macurdy's gaze. "Did you just now"-he waved vaguely-"arrive through the, ah, aperture between universes?"

"I came through the gate on Injun Knob."

"How do you feel?"

Macurdy reached back, feeling his behind. "Not too good. That sonofabitch I slammed against the wall had been jabbing my rear end with his spear all the way from the woods." He stepped to the door and peered out. The unconscious man had been taken away, but one of the others had been left on guard. The man scowled at Macurdy, and gestured threateningly with his spear.

"Okay," Macurdy said placatingly in his direction. "Okay. I'm not looking for trouble. I don't doubt you're good to your wife and mother, and all I want to do is get along."

He backed away from the door, bent painfully and picked up his jacket, then straightened and looked the cabin over. It was about twelve by twelve feet, and low roofed. On one wall hung two sleeping pads, long sacks of straw. A pair of split-plank shelves had been built on another. At the windowless end was a mud and stick fireplace; a copper kettle and ladle hanging beside it. Embers glowed beneath a blanket of wood ash.

"And you just arrived?" the man asked. "Just now?"

"Yep."

"You don't feel ill?"

"Nope."

"Remarkable. When my companion and I came through, eight years ago, we arrived desperately ill. I had a fever, cramps, and severe diarrhea for two days. My companion was so ill, I feared for his life. I've been told that two young men died after coming through, some years before we did."

"How about two women and one man, a month ago?"

"What did they look like?"

"The women looked young, like maybe twenty years, one of them pretty, the other one twice as pretty. The prettiest one had red hair, the other reddish brown."

"And green eyes?"

"Green and tilty. What happened to them?"

"I understand they were provided with horses and an escort, and left. I didn't actually see them. They're said to belong to a powerful, um-it translates to Sisterhood, but actually it seems to be some sort of politically influential power group." He paused, curious. "What do you know of them?"

"I'm married to the red-headed one. Her name is Varia. She's a sort of witch, but nothing bad. No deals with the devil or anything."

"I've heard," the man said, "that one arrived manacled."

"That's her. That's my wife. They came and took her away while I was in town. I followed them to get her back, but didn't catch up with them, so I got me a rifle and pistol, and waited till the gate opened again." He drew the.44. "Lost the rifle when I came through, and this didn't work when I tried to use it."

"Ah. Ours didn't either. We'd thought perhaps it was the ammunition, but if yours didn't…"

"Maybe guns don't work in this world."

The old man shook his head. "Our human biochemistry functions properly here. I can't imagine why nitrocellulose wouldn't explode." He sighed, got up carefully and held out a hand. "Excuse my lack of manners. I am, or was, Doctor Edward Talbott, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri. Just now my profession is slave, and normally at this time of day, I'd be working at some sort of hard labor. Yesterday, however, I was quite ill, with a fever, so I've been given a day to recover. My health has been surprisingly good here, so far as infections are concerned. My problems have been structural: arthritis, actually."

"Mine is that sonofabitch's spear. I don't suppose you'd look at my rear end and see how bad he stabbed me?"

"I can look, but I'm afraid I have nothing for bandages. Just a moment." A fat stub of candle squatted on the table. He took it to the fireplace and lit it at an ember, then came back. Macurdy pulled down his overalls and trousers and bent over a bit. "They don't seem severe," Talbott said. "The bleeding has stopped, though obviously there was quite a bit of it earlier."

Macurdy pulled his trousers up and sat down on the bench, hissing with pain as he did. Then they talked. Macurdy didn't have to pump Talbott; the professor was starved to talk with someone newly from the other side. Mostly he talked about this side; things the newcomer needed to know. He also speculated that the sergeant who'd brought Macurdy in might suspect him of connections with the Sisterhood. "That would account for your arriving functional," he added, "and for his treating you with restraint, despite what you did to one of his men."

He changed the subject. "You referred to your wife as a witch. What does she do that seems 'witchy'? I'm very interested in the paranormal; it's what drew me to Injun Knob."

"What she does ain't any kind of normal," Macurdy answered. "For one thing, when I was five years old, she could pass for twenty. And when I was twenty-five, she could still pass for twenty, just as easy. And she can lay a spell on you, at least if you're willing.

"She says I've got the blood line for magic, too-that my great-great-grampa ran away from the Sisterhood. For a couple of weeks she spelled me about every evening and had me doing drills. To 'open up my powers,' she said. Which might be why I didn't get sick, crossing over. But I never showed much sign of magic powers."

Macurdy got off the bench, wincing again. Going to the candle, he took a cartridge from his pistol and pried the bullet out with his jackknife, planning to toss the powder onto the embers, to see if it flared up. But when he shook the cartridge case over his palm, nothing came out. He peered inside it. Empty! They'd worked when he'd taken target practice. He tried another, then went to his jacket, and from a pocket took one of the large cartridges for the.45-70; it was empty too.

Grunting, he turned to Professor Talbott. "No powder. They were fine, three, four days ago."

Talbott said nothing, just sat staring at his hands, which lay folded on his knees. For a moment Macurdy stood thoughtful, then tossed the brass case into the ashes and sat down again. "You know what you never told me?" he said. "What they call this place. Not Missouri, I don't suppose."

"Oz." Talbott pronounced it Ohz. "Imagine it being spelled as in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but pronounced with a broad O."

"I remember that book. We had it in school." Macurdy grinned. "I didn't know you could get to Oz from Missouri. Thought you had to start from Kansas.

"Hmm. O-Z, but pronounced like in Ozark. I expected there'd be Ozarks on this side, too; expected to come out on something like Injun Knob."

"There are mountains not very far west of here," Talbott answered, "considerably higher than the Ozarks. You can see them in the daytime. They may be why the forests are so thick. We seem to have an orographically-enhanced summer monsoon here, off what they call the Southern Sea, which I suspect is less landlocked than the Gulf of Mexico. And the winters are wet, with frontal storms out of the west. Though the moisture for them might be from the Southern Sea, too, brought in by cyclonic circulation around the storm front."