Now memory rushed back to me, and sudden fear came with it. Where was Lantin? Had he survived the crash? I began to struggle up from my reclining position, but sank back for a moment as a door in one of the walls slid aside, and a man entered the room.
Tall and commanding of appearance, with dark hair and clear youthful face, yet something about the eyes stamped him as a man of middle age, almost elderly. He was dressed in a short white tunic, bordered with three narrow stripes of purple. When he perceived that I was awake and regarding him, he paused for a moment in surprize, then came on toward me.
A friendly smile illumined his face as he spoke to me, in the Kanlar tongue.
"You are awake, Wheelaire? And your friend, too, has just awakened."
"Lantin!" I exclaimed. "He is all right? He was not hurt?"
The other smiled. "No more than yourself. Would you like to see him?"
I assented eagerly, and made to rise, but he pushed me back. "It is not needful," he said, and reaching down to the foot of the metal platform on which I lay, he touched a concealed button. At once, the platform rose gently from its supports until it swung in the air four feet above the floor. When my new-found friend laid his hand on its edge, it moved gently through the air under the impetus of a slight push.
He saw my astonishment, and explained, "The metal is clorium, the same material we once used for our air-boats. It is weightless, under the influence of certain forces." Then, as an afterthought, he added, "My name is Kethra."
Pushing my platform easily through the air before him, he was moving toward the door of the room when I stopped him with a gesture. "Can I look from the window there a moment?" I asked, indicating the high openings. By way of answer, he stepped over to the window in question, his hand on my platform's edge bringing me there also. I raised myself, gazed eagerly out.
I saw at once that I must be near the top of the great cone-shaped building we had been making for when we crashed. Below, and all around, the white buildings extended to the horizons, looking like thousands of huge geometry-models cast down indiscriminately, cones and spheres and cubes. High above them as I was, yet I could discern swift movement in the streets, crowds of pedestrians surging to and fro, flashing vehicles of strange design, that followed the broad thoroughfares, rising in the air here and there to pass over each other. Glancing away down the long, slanting side of the cone near whose summit I stood, I saw at its base other great crowds, who massed and swirled aimlessly around the building. I turned to Kethra.