And then he sat bolt upright.
He was on a train.
The clicking was the sound of wheels against rails. He stared at the room around him, at the open window and the flat green fields rolling by beyond it. For a moment he was extremely dizzy. He lowered his head and waited.
After a while his head cleared and he could stand up. He walked unsteadily to the window and looked out, saw nothing but fields and quick-swishing poles. He turned back to the bunk on which he had been lying. He was alone in the compartment.
A train?
How in God's name did he get on a train?
The last thing he remembered was a numbing crouch, a heart-bursting need for action. Slowly at first, then with great clarity, he remembered being on the floor of the drugstore, waiting for the crowd to gather so he could make a dash for the door.
But he could not remember moving. He could not remember anything but crouching. And then—nothing. His memory ended like a burned-out match.
And there were no bruises or lumps on his head. He felt it carefully to make sure. The only pain he felt anywhere in his body was a dull, left-over aching in his side—that had come from the landing in the pod.
Well somehow, obviously, he had been knocked out.