As Walt listened, he thought; I wonder if earthmen can prevent themselves from being teleported? I hope not. I want to teleport them this way and that way, from all around me, whenever one comes close to me. It's the easiest way to kill them. It's a shame I couldn't get the one on Earth.... She would have suddenly materialized, bloody, twisted, wrenched, turned inside out—a beautiful corpse; that's what we should do with earthlings, and with traitors.
**Lycan: Hurry with your charges.**
**One more week, Elder. And they will be ready to attack!**
CHAPTER V
The thing Walt first noticed was the hugeness of space around his tiny, falling ship. Through the viewplate above him—he was supine—the vast, star-set blackness seemed infinite, seemed to suck his mind out of his body until it was connected only by a tenuous thread. He had seen space from the great wheel that was dwindling behind him; but never before had its immediacy been impressed on him with such force: here, it was an intimate wrapping, clutching at him from all sides.
He had pointed out as nearly as he could determine it from brief, telepathic contact (the aliens showed him how to center on her) Julia's location on the planet. The aliens had promised to land him in an unpopulated area on the same part of the continent. The aliens' thoughts did not come through the shielding around their space station; nor did the thoughts of his compartment-mates. For the first time in his life, he was terribly alone.
Earth grew in the viewplate; expanding majestically to obliterate the surrounding space, it grew shimmery along its almost regular circumference. The orbit of his saucer-shaped ship flattened into a great spiral. The ship twisted around the Earth from shadow to light and then into shadow again as if it were attached to the loose end of a piece of string being wound up by the slowly turning planet. Gravity pressed his body, crushed him; a sudden, sickening drop left him weightless.
The aliens maneuvered his ship carefully. Walt could not—as the aliens could—be immersed in a liquid tank to make possible instantaneous changes of direction. They let him down tenderly.
Hello, Julia thought brightly.