Carry me down the ladder. The membrane parted in front of my eyes. I walked toward the ladder like a person wearing an elaborate top-heavy costume. I knew the thing was in my brain, but that didn’t bother me. I’m not sure whether it was controlling the chemistry of my brain in order to subvert panic, or it was communicating “trust me”—or I was in such a state of shock that I would do whatever I was told, no matter who or what requested it.

It felt like a kind of VR. But it was not a dream. It was happening.

I slid the ladder to the ground and carefully backed down it. Now walk into this hole.

I knew the hole wasn’t real. Between the road and our house there had appeared an artifact sort of like the antique “postmodern” subway entrances in Atlanta: an unornamented and well-lit plain ramp descending into the ground at a comfortable fifteen-degree angle. This was metal, though, not cement. It went about twenty meters and turned right, still descending. As I walked down, I could feel it closing up behind me.

Forming each word carefully in my mind, I asked Where are you taking me? It didn’t answer, but communicated a desire for me to be patient.

We passed through a sort of invisible wall, a soap bubble of resistance, and we were suddenly in an arctic waste. My bare feet burned and curled on the ice; my skin raised up in gooseflesh. An instant later I was warm again.

The creature slid off me with a slurping noise like a silly sex joke, taking my robe along with it, inside out over my head. It floated in front of me and dropped the sodden robe, which froze solid before it hit the ice. Are you comfortable?

I said I was and looked around. Epsilon squatted low on the horizon, a red ball that looked too large, the sky blue-violet, cloudless, three dim stars showing. There were fantastic ice mountains with ragged razor edges like primitive chipped flint tools. A constant wind keened at the upper limit of audibility and granules of hardened snow rattled along the ice. It smelled like metal.

Behind me, the collapsed remains of a small hut. A corroded machine stood next to it; atop a five-meter pole, a thing with eccentric vanes spun madly, clicking, squeaking. On the door to the hut was a faded stencil:

U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
WEDDELL SEA METEOROLOGICAL MONITOR #3
PLEASE REPORT DAMAGE
L. AMERICA
3924477 COLLECT

This is Earth? I asked.

Yes. I wanted someplace on Earth where you had never been, so you would know it was not taken from your memory; and a place where there were no people around to be confused by our sudden appearance.

You can travel to Earth? Anyplace on Earth?

Many planets. Step forward.