"I must be dead! Oh God, I'm dead!"
Saxon could perceive the girl cowering above a small pile of clothes, frightened, helpless, blind. She didn't have his extra-human sixth sense to substitute for sight. She was trembling violently, a slim-naked wraith without substance.
The little pile of clothes at her feet made it suddenly clear what had befallen Mercedes and the crew, what had happened to Ileth and himself. In some fashion, the Aliens had transmuted them into a space where their three-dimensional organs of perception no longer registered.
He moved to the girl, touched her arm.
Saxon was not conscious of a sense of contact, but a vague shock like a weak electric current ran up his arm to his brain. Ileth flinched back in terror.
Again he touched her arm, thinking, "Ileth, am I getting through? Ileth, am I getting through?" over and over again.
"Yes," came the unexpected answer. "Yes. Yes. Is it you, Jon? We're dead, you know, Jon."
"No," he thought. "We're not dead. We've been transmuted but we're not dead."
A command rang sharply in his disembodied mind. "Lead the girl and follow me!"
Saxon's attention swung back to the Alien, perceived the man threatening him with the cylinder which had blasted them into this indeterminate dimension.