Because, as the clouds shifted to reveal darker spaces, Thor could see stars glittering in the blackness. He thought, Something has lifted the house right off the campus. Something has us in its grip. We're being taken away from the Earth—taken out in space. For he knew from the star formations that he could see momentarily, that something was moving him and the house swiftly across the void.
The house bumped, pitching at a gentle angle. The floor was like the deck of a ship caught in the trough of a wave. Thor rolled with it, legs straddled.
The front door cracked open as the house settled onto something solid. The purple mists began to flee before the pale yellow light streaming through the door and window.
Thor walked with the girl to the doorway and stood on the cracked sill, looking out. I'm delirious, he thought. I've read some fantastic tale and gotten drunk, and this is the result. What I'm looking at is the chaos of a surrealist nightmare.
Sprawling grey rock humped itself into impossible contortions under the warmth of a great yellow sun. Where the rock disappeared, red grass swayed its blades. Low mists hung in the distance.
The girl whimpered. She whispered in a language that made Thor think of jewels in a tumbling spring, clicking and clacking. He grinned down at her.
"Don't ask me, sweet stuff," he said. "Offhand I'd say that Dali had us in one of his landscapes. And you wouldn't know about him. But as far as any explanation of where we are or what happened, I'm up a tree. Still, I rather imagine that something went wrong with the space coordinates."
He went on dreamily, "We don't know an awful lot about space. Maybe it moves along with the rest of the expanding universe, and maybe it doesn't. But if a certain segment of space was addicted to going off on a tangent—away from its usual sphere—it could conceivably snatch up whatever was in its path, and sort of kidnap it. Get it, sweet stuff?"
Like a woman, she ignored everything but the one thing. Seriously she repeated, "Sweet stoff. Sweet stoff."
Thor laughed, "That's you." He touched her with his finger. She shook her head vigorously, making the yellow hair fly out fanwise.