Dura had expected to make out the blue lines of the Interface, this box of light, from the inside. But there was no sign of the other faces, the rest of the wormhole; instead, beyond the walls of the ship, there was only a darkness even deeper than the twilit glow of the underMantle. It was as if they were entering — not a box of light — but the mouth of a corridor, like one of Parz's dingy alleys. In fact, it seemed that she could make out the lines of a corridor, stretching through the wormhole and on into infinity; black on black, it was like staring into a throat. Deep in the corridor there were flashes — sharp, silent and distant, light which splashed briefly over the dim walls. Slowly a picture assembled in her mind, each flash providing another fragment; the corridor was a smooth-walled cylinder perhaps five mansheights across and...

And how deep?

The walls were all around them now; the ebony throat enclosed the fragile craft as if it had been swallowed. She felt a rush of Air through the capillaries of her head; illuminated in stabs, fragments of the walls raced upward past the ship like pieces of a dream. The walls seemed to converge at a great distance, closing around a point at infinity. But that was impossible — wasn't it? — because the Interface itself, the four-faced frame of light, was only ten or a dozen mansheights across.

But of course the corridor was immensely long — impossibly long — for the very purpose of a wormhole was to connect far-distant places. And now she was entering such a wormhole; soon the ship would be passing through the device to emerge...

Somewhere else.

For a moment, fear, primitive, irrational and stark, surfaced in her mind; it was as if the mystery of it all was ramming itself into her eyes, ears and mind. She closed her eyes and wrapped her fingers in the soft leather of the pig harness. Was she, now, going to crumble into superstitious panic?

The wormhole was an artifact, she told herself. And an artifact built by humans — by Ur-humans, perhaps, but by humans nonetheless. She should not cringe before a mere device.

She forced her eyes open.

The ship shuddered.

Dura cried, "Too fast! You're going too fast, damn it; we'll turn over if you don't slow down... Are you crazy?"

The control levers were still buried inside Hork's fleshy hands, but when he turned to her his wide face was empty, wondering. "It's not me," he said slowly. "I mean, it's not the ship... we're no longer propelling ourselves. Dura, we're being drawn into the wormhole." He stared at the little control console, as if seeking an answer there. "And there's nothing I can do about it."

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