She ran the last few yards, afraid they had gone forever, but there was the chair the woman sat in, and the cooking equipment, and everything else. There was no sign of human life, and the chill in the air was increasing by the minute as the light failed. But he had hardly begun to touch it when he stopped. There is a knife that can cut openings between the worlds, as well as anything in them. Its power is unlimited, but only in the hands of the one who knows how to use it. And that person is a boy. And then there was the melting of the ice. Exploring those mountains was j his next task. Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living. If only we could stay here like this, and the world could stop turning, and everyone else could fall into a sleep. She turned the alethiometer over and over, her fingers stroking the heavy gold and the smooth crystal and the knurled wheels they knew so well. But he never told me why. It lay across the path, trying to move out of the way and looking at them as if it knew they meant to hurt it. His thumb claw opposed the four finger claws, letting him manipulate objects as skillfully as a human, and now he turned the knife this way and that, bringing it closely to his eyes, holding it to catch the light, testing the edge, the steel edge, on a piece of scrap iron. Cooper sat on the bunk. He licked his dry lips and waited to see what new discomfort was coming. The woman had been preparing a dish of stew, and she peeled a couple of potatoes and cut them into it to make it go farther, urging her husband to offer the travelers some other refreshment while it cooked. In the hiss and flare of steam, he felt the atoms finally settle together, and he knew that the knife was as keen as before, the point as infinitely rare. What does he look like? He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the craft, ignoring the gunfire, the billowing smoke, the cries of alarm and confusion. Then she realized what that meant. Loading her rucksack again, she made her way down onto the coarse, rich grass of the prairie, aiming for the nearest stand of trees, four or five miles away. It was a good thing we did. Look at the little one. And we kept on talking and then there was a birthday cake. He found himself in a big square kitchen, an oldfashioned place with white china on a wooden dresser, and a scrubbed pine table, and a hearth where a black kettle stood cold. Next door there was a pantry, with two shelves full of apples that filled the whole room with fragrance. The silence was oppressive. On the horizon there was the blue gleam of the sea. A broad, slowmoving river wound through rich grassland in the middle distance, and at the foot of the long slope, among copses of small trees and rows of vegetables, stood a village of thatched houses. More creatures like these moved about among the houses, or tended crops, or worked among the trees. The floodlights swung in the wind, so that nothing seemed steady, not even the black rocks of the mountainside. Collect it carefully, every single hair. Then open another world, any will do, and put the hair through into it, and then close it again. Do it now, at once. The same emptiness there is down in the abyss. No one knew, because the edge was too fine to see. Their voices were no louder than dry leaves falling. As soon as the greetings were over, she began to speak. What about my vows? And then the ground began to shake. From somewhere very deep came a growling, grinding noise, as if the whole center of the earth were turning on itself like a vast millwheel, and little fragments of stone began to fall from the roof of the tunnel. The ground lurched suddenly to one side.