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and cloudless sky, was the probable source of the pale-greenish dung—a large white seagull. That bird and the stinking mess now clotting his old, faded bandanna were, if truly hallucinatory, the most thoroughly vivid hallucinations of which he had ever heard.
    Deciding, finally, to get it over with, face facts and see if he could determine just how serious were his injuries, Fitz first examined his face and head, finding no single lump, bump, broken skin or even mild pain . . . except in his hands. Scrutiny of them revealed blisters on each palm, apparently broken by contact with the abrasive sand and now stinging with the salty sweat from his face.
    But his feet and legs still felt cold. Without yet trying to roll over and thus possibly compound any spinal injury, he gingerly moved his legs and feet. They felt to be moving normally, with no dearth of sensation, though they still felt cold. So he rolled over very slowly and . . .
    His legs and feet were gonel They ended cleanly at

    mid-thigh, as if they had both been thrust through roundish holes in a sheet of plywood. Beyond, where his reeling senses told him that his legs and feet should be, lay only undisturbed sand and a bleached, almost-buried log.
    Suddenly, his entire body was gone cold—cold and clammy and bathed in icy sweat, while his nape hairs prickled erect. His wide, incredulous gaze fixed upon that space, that preternaturally empty space, which should have contained the feet and legs of Alfred O'Brien Fitzgilbert II, he brought up his shaking right hand to solemnly sign himself, mumbling the while half-forgotten childhood prayers.
    "Oh, Holy Mother of God," he at last stuttered, "Wh . . . what's hap . . . happened to m . . . me?"

    Then, with absolutely no sensation of transition from the hot, sunny sand-world to the dank, dark crypt, he was sitting upon the wet stones of the floor, the beam of light from the shattered lens of his flashlight picking out his legs and his two feet—one now bare and one, shod—and the first couple of shallow stairs.
    He half-turned to look back whence he had come and gasped. His right arm, beneath the clenched fist of which he still could feel the hot, gritty sand, ended a bit below the elbow as cleanly as had his legs when he had lain in that other place, seeming to be immured within one of the solid-looking, greyish stones of the wall.
    "Now, wait just a damned minute!" he exclaimed aloud. "That's behind me, God damn it. I shouldn't be able to see it without the flashlight. ,,
    Not until he had reached out, secured the now-battered flashlight and switched it off could he recognize the source of the other, dim, diffuse light. The radiance was emitted by the very square of stonework in which he more or less sat. So very dim was it that it quickly became clear to him how he had missed noticing it at all during his earlier exploration of the room; his bright, white flashlight's beam had blinded him to the lesser light source.
    Those stones that shone with light were arranged in a rectangle that began a foot or so from the nearest corner of the room. That rectangle was, he estimated roughly, about five feet high and four feet wide, its lowest point at or so close as to not matter to the floor and its highest point some foot below the stones of the ceiling. Only a child or a midget would be able to walk through it upright. Anyone else would have to at least duck his head, himself included, in order to pass through the wall.

    "What the hell am I thinking about?" Fitz demanded of himself. "Here I sit, rationally considering how best and easiest to do something that is utterly impossible by every law of physics of which I ever heard. It's all completely impossible; none of it can be happening."
    His mind whirled when he consciously tried to reason out the events of the last few minutes, so he resolutely shoved reason onto a back burner, for the nonce.
    Now, if he could so easily and effortlessly return to the stone crypt, then why