Suddenly Kesley felt himself struck by a blinding bolt of force; it spun him around, whirled him as if he were in a maelstrom, lifted him up. He saw the smiling faces of Spahl and Foursmith, saw all the mutants dwindle behind him. He rose, higher and higher, spinning vertiginously, frozen in an instantaneous moment of time. Space hung beneath him. Then he began to fall. XIII For a moment, after the spinning stopped, Kesley imagined he was back on the sands outside Wiener. Then, gradually, his eyes began to shift into focus. He looked around. He was in a room. That was the first thing to grasp. His senses told him he was in a room, high, with bare walls that glowed of their own inner luminescence. Good. He was in a room. He was no longer in the _same_ room that he had been in in Mutie City. He was sure of that, too. The big-skulled mutant named Edwin had lifted him--_teleport_, Spahl said?--and had sent him somewhere. He was somewhere else than Mutie City. Patiently, his quivering mind reassembled the world of sense-constructs and data from which he had been hurled. He was not alone. He made out the other figure clearly: a tall, old man, sitting upright in a webwork chair halfway across the room. The old man's eyes were closed; he grasped a small object, unfamiliar looking, in one hand. His skull was hairless. Kesley assembled the data. "The mutants finally found you," the other said. His voice was deep and musical, a rich basso with an underlying harmonic tremolo. "They were searching quite diligently, you know." "Yes, they found me," Kesley said. "I'm here. Where's _here_?" "Antarctica," the old man said. Nodding, Kesley absorbed the fact and added it to those he had already. The jolting shock of the teleportation was beginning to wear off now; having been plucked from the spatial framework, he was returning to it, somewhere else. His mind emerged from its numbness. "You're Daveen the Singer," he said calmly. "I am Daveen," the other admitted. Kesley studied the old man, realizing with a shock that he had almost forgotten the contours of Narella's face until seeing the girl's features mirrored here on Daveen's untroubled face. A tense silence prevailed in the room. Finally Daveen said: "Five years has changed you, young friend. You've lost your youthful face; I see beginning wrinkles where smoothness once was." Kesley frowned. "How do you know? You're blind, aren't you?" "The blind have ways of seeing. Besides, it's not a difficult matter to guess that after what you have been through--" "Just what do you know about me?" Kesley interrupted. "Who are you, anyway?"