Falk knelt on the slider, an elegant little machine, black paristolis inlaid with a three-dimensional arabesque of platinum wire. The ornamentation all but concealed the controls, but he had played with a slider at Zove's House, and after studying the control-arcs a minute he touched the left arc, moved his finger along it till the slider had silently risen about two feet, and then with the right arc sent the little craft slipping over the yard and the river-bank till it hovered above the scummy ice of the backwater below the cabin. He looked back then to call goodbye, but the old man had already gone into the cabin and shut the door. And as Falk steered his noiseless craft down the broad dark avenue of the river, the enormous silence closed in around him again.

Icy mist gathered on the wide curves of water ahead of him and behind him, and hung among the gray trees on either bank. Ground and trees and sky were all gray with ice and fog. Only the water sliding along a little slower than he slid airborne above it was dark. When on the following day snow began to fall the flakes were dark against tie sky, white against the water before they vanished, endlessly falling and vanishing in the endless current.

This mode of travel was twice the speed of walking, and safer and easier—too easy indeed, monotonous, hypnotic. Falk was glad to come ashore when he had to hunt or to make camp. Waterbirds all but flew into his hands, and animals coming down to the shore to drink glanced at him as if he on the slider were a crane or heron skimming past, and offered their defenseless flanks and chests to his hunting gun. Then all he could do was skin, hack up, cook, eat, and build himself a little shelter for the night against snow or rain with boughs or bark and the up-ended slider as a roof; he slept, at dawn ate cold meat left from last night, drank from the river, and went on. And on.