"Yes," said Will. "It is over." His hand touched Bee affectionately. "The strangeness will soon be gone, I think. You all right, Rob?"
"Yes," I said. In truth, every moment a rationality of being was coming to me. And curiosity, of itself evidence of normality, made me ask, "Where are we going? What are we going to do?"
"Going with Ala," said Will briefly. "Her people are friendly to us—deploring the threatened invasion of our world."
I realized that he and Ala at their first meeting must have exchanged knowledge, and planned what we now were to do.
Bee asked, "Are we going far? Will it take long?"
Ala seemed puzzled. "Far"—"long." The words involved Space and Time. I saw that at first they had no meaning to her.
"We are going there," she answered. Her gesture was vaguely downward ahead of us. "Come," she added.
We started. My impression now is that we were walking. I could feel a part of my body in movement, quite as though of my volition I were moving my legs. A sense of lightness again possessed me; a lack of stability. But I could feel solidity beneath me, and I was moving upon it.
We walked then, down the hill. There was vegetation; things, let me say, seemed rooted within the ground. But they bent from our advance as though with a knowledge and a fear that we might tread upon them.
The scene was no longer empty. A rolling land, with what might have been a mountain range rising in the distance. All in that half-light of seeming phosphorescence. I noticed now that the familiar convexity of earth was gone. The scene had a queer concavity; to the limit of my vision it stretched upward; as though we were upon the inner surface of some vast hollow globe with the concave darkness overhead coming down to meet it. A hollow globe within which we were standing; but it seemed of infinite size.