f drawn into the
force-vortex, still clinging to her hand.

* * * * *

Transition was mild enough, less shock than he had expected.

A moment of chill detachment, as if something indescribably cold
shattered his body into component atoms and readjusted them to new
patterns. He gasped, his body making the same thermal changes as if he
stood under a cold shower. He shivered.

Then it was like coming out of the blanketing fog of horror into the
sunlight of sanity; like rebirth, painlessly, into an eery
other-dimension.

There was light and sound about him, a stir of cool air. Songeen had
become separated from him in that moment of strange passage. She stood
apart, watching him with laughter in her eyes. Laughter as cool and calm
and soothing as the soft wind that riffled her hair. She had stripped
off the bulky armor, shed her plastic helmet. Now she was all woman
again, and somehow, oddly, a symbol of all women.

Other senses than his five sprang into life within him. Weird
_awareness_ through new perceptions which were nameless to his mind or
to his memory.

At first there was no terror, no surprise. Merely an overwhelming
_difference_.

Overhead was starless night, but not darkness. It was a vaulted,
infinite sky, like an inverted ocean of tinted crystal, transparent, but
softly colored, deepening imperceptibly to a heart of emerald, a-glow
with faintest witchlights. All around him was a maze of shimmering
crystal in odd forms, grotesque, clear but echoing the witchlights of
that haunted sky.

Wind-borne, came the faint, sweet chiming of distinct porcelain bells.
The place was alive with movement, sensed but incompletely seen. Even
the wind flowed in almost visible currents, thickened as if the air had
become dense, molten glass. All forms in the maze of crystal varied
constantly. Light flared and died in odd rhythms, and the almost visible
winds played icy arpeggios upon strings of spun glass, like Aeolian
harps. Showering notes like those of Chinese windbells hung in clusters
in the eddies of great wind rivers, and both sound and light flowed
together and wove strange patterns and infinite variations.

It was not quite pleasant, vaguely nerve-tightening, but highly
stimulating. Sound was muted at first, as was the light. Images blurred
and outlines were unsteady, baffling. Everything fused and flowed
together like half molten shards of broken glass. Wavelengths of
troubled