"We'll have to follow him more closely," Kunklin said, beginning the work of assembly. "But after all, we're very near the end. I expect we will be going home—"
He broke off in mid-sentence as a tall, unusually symmetrical young woman walked leggily around the corner of the hall. Kunklin was invisible behind the warp shield, but although she could not see him he could clearly see her, and his eyebrows rose happily.
"Um," he began, "it begins to come home to me now why this planet is so well-visited. First this Earthman's father, then the Faktors—"
Prule cut him off. Kunklin was a first rate repairman, but he was also a first rate lecher, a trait he had carried to several harrowing extremes on other humanoid worlds, to Prule's almost Quakerian sorrow. Prule soberly pressed him back to work, to the messy job of assembling Web Hilton from the molecular recording.
And when Kunklin's head was down and busy, Prule's eyes quickly followed the pneumatic young lady as she walked down the carpeted hall.
And now Web was walking down a street in the black night, walking slowly, without purpose or direction or intelligence. He was aware of walking for quite some while, numbly, vacantly, as if he was rising from a long dark tunnel, before he reached the end and came suddenly alive.
He stopped in the center of the sidewalk.
It had happened again.
Bewildered, he looked around him. There was nothing about the street, about the long low rows of squat black houses, which was familiar. He had no reason of his own to come here; he was not even sure he was still in Chicago.