alien....

III

There was at first the feeling of warm sunlight on his flesh, then a pungent scent of crushed foliage, green and heady, very strong and familiar.

As his mind took hold, a whisper of wind hummed into his consciousness and a shimmering golden brightness began to grow upon his closed eyelids. Abruptly, unity of sensation was achieved. Jerry Norcriss "was" in a sunlit part of the woods near the mines, feeling the alien's perceptions as though they were his own.

He crinkled his eyes against the glare, then slowly opened them.

As he blinked his eyes to focus the golden glare, he spotted a strange little cluster of tiny sticks, with miniature leaves sprouting greenly on thread-like branches. Halfway between his face and this fragile copse slithered a brilliant blue line, ribbon-thin, through a serpentine gouge along the earth. On the far side of this trickle lay a rich tumble of soft green velvet, ending at a group of more of those twig-copses. Puzzled, Jerry turned his gaze skyward. Within the warm blue canopy overhead he saw clouds ... but clouds unlike any he'd ever seen for size. None of them could have been more than a foot in diameter. They hung against the sky like cotton-covered basketballs.

He returned his gaze groundward, and for the first time saw the scuffed grayish area of earth between himself and the trickle. A wiry network of metal glittered there, the wires in pairs, and the pairs disappearing into small square punctures against a wall of banked soil.

Then Jerry gasped. His mind had apprehended the implications of his vista so suddenly that he was staggered.

All the facts sprang into proper perspective. The twigs were actually tall trees, the tumble of velvet a wide stretch of grassy sward, the trickle was a rushing blue river, and the tiny wire-network in the grayish area was the tracks for the mine-cars, leading down into the planet through those tiny square adits.

Jerry had unconsciously been receiving sensations in terms of his host's size. A quick calculation showed him that his head must be easily five hundred feet in the air.

Cautiously, he glanced for the first time toward the body of his host, to see what sort of creature he was in Contact with.

There was nothing whatever to be seen.

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