doesn't work by wires or radio or anything complicated like that. It
just hooks into local space-time.

I have been told that its inside working part is made up of vastly
tough, vastly hard giant molecules, each one of which is practically a
vest-pocket cosmos in itself. Outside, it looks like a portable radio
with a few more dials and some telltales and switches and plug-ins for
earphones and a lot of other sensory thingumajigs.

But the Maintainer was gone and the Void hadn't closed in, yet. By this
time, I was so fagged, I didn't care much whether it did or not.

One thing for sure, the Maintainer had been switched to Introvert before
it was spirited away or else its disappearance automatically produced
Introversion, take your choice, because we sure were Introverted--real
nasty martinet-schoolmaster grip of reality on my thoughts that I knew,
without trying, liquor wouldn't soften, not a breath of Change Wind,
absolutely stifling, and the gray of the Void seeming so much inside my
head that I think I got a glimmering of what the science boys mean when
they explain to me that the Place is a kind of interweaving of the
material and the mental--a Giant Monad, one of them called it.

Anyway, I said to myself, "Greta, if this is Introversion, I want no
part of it. It is not nice to be cut adrift from the cosmos and know it.
A lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific and a starship between galaxies
are not in it for loneliness."

* * * * *

I asked myself why the Spiders had ever equipped Maintainers with
Introversion switches anyway, when we couldn't drill with them and
weren't supposed to use them except in an emergency so tight that it was
either Introvert or surrender to the Snakes, and for the first time the
obvious explanation came to me:

Introversion must be the same as scuttling, its main purpose to withhold
secrets and materiel from the enemy. It put a place into a situation
from which even the Spider high command couldn't rescue it, and there
was nothing left but to sink down, down (out? up?), down into the Void.

If that was the case, our chances of getting back were about those of my
being a kid again playing in the Dunes on the Small Time.

I edged a little closer to Sid and sort of squunched under his shoulder
and rubbed my cheek against the smudged, gold-worked gray velvet. He
looked down and I said, "A long way to Lynn Regis, eh, Siddy?"

"Sweetling, thou spokest a m