“Pardon,” it said, revealing a nearly invisible slitlike mouth in the midst of the mass. “I had not even the slightest suspicion that there might be Earthlike humans on this planet, although God knows there is certainly every other nightmare creature.”

Brazil frowned. “You know Earth?”

“Of course. I was born there and once looked much as you.” The mass changed, writhed, and took on an increasingly humanoid shape, until, standing before them, it became what looked for all the world like a life-sized animated carving in obsidian or jade of an Earth-human man, middle-aged but ramrod straight. There was even a suggestion of a bushy mustache and the semblance of, yes, some sort of uniform. “Colonel Jorge Lunderman, late of the Air Force of the Republic of Brazil, rather abruptly retired but at your service.”

“So you’re one of the two officers that they told me about! I wondered who you were and how you wound up coming through. Oh—sorry. Captain Solomon is my name. David Solomon.”

“Captain? In the service of what nation?”

“None, really. Merchant marine. Countless ships under the usual flags of convenience.”

“You were in port, then, in Rio?”

“No, just on holiday there. I hadn’t been in Brazil in—a very long time.”

“I was commandant of the Northwestern Defense Sector—the area mostly of jungle and isolated settlements between Manaus and the western and northern national borders. A very large meteor struck, harmlessly, in the middle of the jungle, but a mostly American television news crew who went in to investigate and report on it vanished completely. There was quite a search using every resource at our command, but it was as if they had vanished into nothingness.”