It hit his eyes with a familiarity that made him start. The familiarity was a refuge, and violently his mind clawed at it, tried to find other familiar things. But the towers, the looped roadways, that was all there was--and one small line of metal ribbon that soared out across the desert, supported by strut-work pylons. The transit ribbon! He followed it with his eyes, praying it would lead to something more familiar. The thirteenth pylon--he had counted them as he ran his eye along the silver length--was crumpled, as though a fist had smashed it. The transit ribbon snarled in mid-air and ceased. The abrupt end again sent his mind clawing back toward familiarity: _I am Jon Koshar_ (followed by the meaningless number that had been part of his name for five years). _I want to be free_ (and for a moment he saw again the dank, creosoted walls of the cabins of the penal camp, and heard the clinking chains of the cutter teeth as he had heard them for so many days walking to the mine entrance while the yard-high ferns brushed his thighs and forearms ... but that was in his mind). The only other things his scrambling brain could reach were facts of negation. He was some place he had _never_ been before. He did _not_ know how he had gotten there. He did _not_ know how to get back. And the close horizon, the double shadows ... now he realized that this was _not_ Earth (Earth of the Thirty-fifth Century, although he gave it another name, Fifteenth Century G.F.). But the City.... It was on earth, and he was on earth, and he was--had been--in it. Again the negations: the City was _not_ on a desert, nor could its dead, deserted towers cast double shadows, nor was the transit ribbon broken. The transit ribbon! No! It couldn't be broken. He almost screamed. _Don't let it be broken, please...._ The entire scene was suddenly jerked from his head. There was nothing left but blue smoke, cool as blown ice, inside him, around him. He was spinning in blue smoke. Sudden lightning seared his eyeballs, and the shivering after-image faded, shifted, became ... a web of silver fire, the red of polished carbuncle, the green of beetles' wings. CHAPTER I Silent as a sleeping serpent for sixty years, it spanned from the heart of Telphar to the royal palace of Toromon. From the ashes of the dead city to the island capital, it connected what once had been the two major cities, the only cities of Toromon. Today there was only one. In Telphar, it soared above ashes and fallen roadways into the night. Miles on, the edge of darkness paled before the morning and in the faint shadow of the transit ribbon, at the edge of a field of lava, among the whispering, yard-high ferns, sat row on row of squat shacks, cheerless as roosting macaws. They stood near the entrance of the tetron mines. A few moments before, the light rain had stopped. Water dribbled down the supporting columns of the transit ribbon which made a black band on the fading night.