Dura winced as gas — Air? — puffed into the ship past her face. She found herself holding her breath. With an effort of will she exhaled, emptying her lungs, and opened her mouth to breathe deeply.

"Are you all right?"

She sighed. "Yes. Yes, I'm fine. It's Air all right, Hork... We were expected, it seems." She sniffed. "The Air's cool — cooler than the ship. And it's — I don't know how to describe it — it's fresh. Clean." Clean, in comparison to the murky Air of the City to which she'd grown accustomed. When she closed her eyes and drew in the strange Air it was almost like being back with the Human Beings in the upflux.

...Almost. Yet the Air here had a flat, lifeless, artificial quality to it. It was scrubbed clean of scents, she realized slowly.

Hork pushed past her and out into the room beyond. He looked around with fists clenched, aggressively inquisitive, his robe garish against the soft gray light of the walls. Dura, suppressing pangs of fear, followed him away from the wooden ship's illusory protection.

They hung in the Air of the wormhole chamber. The "Flying Pig" tumbled slowly beside them, a scarred wooden cylinder crude and incongruous within the walls of this finely constructed room.

"If the Ur-human builders could see us now, I wonder what they would say?"

Hork grunted. "Probably, 'Where have you been all this time?' " He Waved experimentally and moved forward a mansheight or so. "Hey. There's a magnetic field here."

"Is it the Magfield?"

"I don't know. I can't tell. If it is, it's weaker than I've ever felt it before."

"Maybe it's artificial... put here to help us move around."

Hork grinned, his confidence growing visibly. "I think you're right, Dura. These people really were expecting us, weren't they?" He looked over his shoulder at the "Pig," inspecting the ship briskly. He pointed, his embroidered sleeve flapping. "Look at that. We've brought a passenger."

Dura turned. There was something clinging to the side of the craft; it was like a huge, metallic leech, spoiling the clean cylindrical lines of the ship. "It's Corestuff," she said. "We've brought a Corestuff berg with us, all the way through the wormhole. It must have stuck to our field-bands..."

"Yes," Hork said. "But by no accident." He made a mock salute to the lump of Corestuff. "Karen Macrae. So glad you could accompany us!"

"You think she's in there? In that berg?"

"Why not?" He grinned at her, his eyecups dark with excitement. "It's possible. Anything's possible."

"But why?"

"Because this trip is as important to Karen Macrae as it is to us, my dear."