The idea that a window, without moving, could show different scenes -- so that it was as if she were looking through the eyes of another -- was beyond comprehension.

But Sura stared at the unfolding image, eyes empty of wonder. She said: "Very nice. Can you make it go any faster?"

Deflated, Erwal sighed. Maybe she should give up trying to work these things out, and accept the windows, as Sura evidently did, for what they were.

Useful magic.

For the next hour and more they roamed vicariously through the abandoned streets of the city-world. This had obviously once been a world of people -- they recognized chairs, bedrooms, tables, all clearly human-sized. But there was no sign of humanity: no pictures on the walls, no decoration anywhere, no curtains or rugs beyond the severely functional. And building after building was filled with huge devices, quite unrecognizable to the two women: vast cylinders lying on their side or pointing through apertures at the sky, and rooms full of gray, coldly anonymous boxes.

Everywhere was darkness and -- Erwal felt -- coldness. The building-world had been left neat, perfect -- not a chair overturned -- and quite empty.

Sura, squatting on the floor, wrapped her arms about herself and shivered. "I don't think I would have liked to have lived here."

"Nor I." Erwal wondered about the purpose of all these banks of machines and boxes. The devices lacked the simple, human utility of the lockers she had found on the ship; these machines were brooding, almost threatening. Perhaps this was a world of weapons, of war.

Maybe, she thought, it was just as well they had found this place empty.

"Erwal." Sura stood gracefully and pointed at the image in the panel; an array of gray boxes was sliding away from them. "What's happening? Are you moving the image again?"

Erwal held her hands up before her face. "You can see I'm not. Sura, I don't understand what is happening." She thrust her hands into the gloves and changed the images in the panels; she looked below, above, to either side of the ship, half-expecting to espy a group of giant machine-men hauling at the ship...

Then she found something.

A tubular curtain, transparent but stained with blue, had fallen all around the ship. Its walls sparkled. The tube reached miles above the surface of the little world, and, looking up it, Erwal could see that it stretched all the way to the ruined Sun-world.

The ship was rising up this tunnel.

Soon the machine-world shrank to a fist-sized ball beneath them.

"Erwal! Do something! Take us away from here! If we crash into the Sun-thing, we'll be destroyed!"

But Erwal could only clench her mittened fists. "I can't," she said softly, staring at the panel. "I can't do anything. It won't respond."

The walls of the tunnel rushed by, a blur now.

A box had closed around Paul.