An hour later, his wife went out to the toolshed to find her husband. All was dark. The air smelled doomful. She called his name several times.
'Gareth?' The toolshed shambled with noise.
'Gareth.' The door lazed open.
'Gareth!' He appeared in the doorway, pop-eyed, his face shining with the chrism of his possession. The. terrible hurt dawdled on his wrung features. His face went slack, and finally his lips bent like iron into an overjoyed leer.
'Gareth-are you all right?' His wife didn't dare touch him.
His face looked sunburned. 'What's happened to you?'
His voice was tricked with grogginess. 'I stumbled and took a fall. I'm a little dazed.'
'What's that on your face?' she asked, wincing against the brunt of the malodor clinging to him.
'Turpentine. I knocked over my paint bottle when I tripped. I'd better get cleaned up.'
'I'll call Doc Burkard.'
Gareth's pop-eyed gaze thumped with alarm. 'No! '
His wife touched his shining neck fur. 'Your neck is cut open, Gareth!'
'I'm all right,' he assured her in his numb voice. 'It's just a scratch. Believe me.'
With much trepidation, his wife obeyed him. By the next morning, she was glad she had. Gareth was himself again, and the wound under his skull looked like nothing more than a welt.
Gareth went off' to work as usual. All the habits were still there, intact. His laughter was warm, his handshake crisp. No one thought for a moment that he was different--except for the two others who were as different as he.
They met at lunch in a local diner. Nothing unusual was said among the two men and the woman who
gathered there, but a foul stain spread in the air around them. And when they broke up after lunch, the diner smelled sour as an: outhouse and customers turned away.
The fetor was under control by the next day. The zotl had made the fine adjustments to this more acidy breed of Foke. The brain of this food was much the same as the Foke brain and an equally bounteous producer of the adrenergic pain molecules the zotl craved. Here was a whole planet swarming with these slow-motion delicacies, and they had stumbled upon it wholly by accident. Their mission had been to ride the Rim looking for gateways out of the black hole. When they had crossed through one, they were to test the lynk technology they carried with them.
No one had expected this test run to find food. They immediately set to work constructing a lynk large enough to accommodate their jumpships.
Carl Schirmer watched the zotl from inside his light lancer armor deep in Enderby Land, Antarctica. His armor had sensed the zotl as he entered the blue shadow of the atmosphere at the end of his flight from the Werld. It informed him that a squadron of zotl needlecraft had lucklessly detected his timelag echo the moment the Rimstalkers propelled him into the center of the ring singularity. His drop into the superspace of the black hole etched a minute trail of doppler-shifted photons on the roiling surface of the Rim's event horizon. By ill chance, a zotl squadron were scanning that exact region at that exact moment. They interpreted the tiny gravity hole as a natural phenomenon, one of the frequent wormhole percolations along the Rim's horizon, and they were able to ride his lynk through the gateway to the multiverse, arriving on earth shortly before he did. Only later in Galgul, when the flight records were finally examined, would the zotl realize that the lynk was Foke-shaped. His armor detected them at once and took him south, landing him among the fields of wind-combed snow and pack ice.
Examining himself, Carl saw a body of iridescent energy, opalescing in the polar darkness. He felt invisible. No awareness of cold or warmth. Only a sense of center, a jewel-cut silence, temple-spaced inside him. From there, his armor showed him everything.
He witnessed the three needlecraft that had slashed to earth before him, and he saw the bulky females dragging themselves into coverts while the needlecraft were hidden underground. In the earth's buoyant gravity, the arachnoid males easily hovered into an attic, a tree, and the rafters of a toolshed to await their new hosts.
Since the zotl and Carl had come from the same fargone place in the cosmos, they were inertially bonded. The sensors in Carl's armor telepathically connected him to them. He was there when Gareth Brewster and two others like him were taken. He felt the lightningflash of the zotl stab, gouging the brain, dazzling the body with another will.
He stayed in a dreamstate with that ugliness, his armor standing in the lucent darkness of Antarctica and the wraith of him nightmaring what the aliens were doing with their stolen bodies.
Eventually, the zotl were at home with their new lives, and the whale music of their thoughts settled into the steady rhythms of their work. Days had passed.
Carl felt no hunger or fatigue. His armor had liberated him from the physical dimension and sustained him in a luminosity of euphoric alertness and stupendous rest that he called no-time. He named it that because when he was in that state, what seemed moments were really days. Time was easy.
When the snow plumed around him with the
thrust of his departure, the armor made him know how long he had waited and where he was going. Armor was not an exact enough name for what enclosed him. He seemed sheathed in lightning, a slick spectral mist that covered him from head to foot. He jetted north into the sunrise, and where the light hit him he glossed like gold.
Carl's long travels on the fallpath had well prepared him for flight, and he was comfortable with the motion- bristling terrain running below him. The strangeness for him was the emptiness of the sky, the fierce circle of the sun, and the endless continuity of the geography. This wasn't the. Werld anymore.
Villages and towns darted by. Forests and jagedged cities. A coma of blue water. Islands. The bayou cities and a bullet-fast run up the Mississippi River. Some people on boats and in planes saw Carl, but they didn't know what
