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Department."
    "Bound to be a human."
    "The minute you stretch it that far, they'll all get the message," McKie said.  "They'll bring in the others before making any official decision."
    Furuneo nodded.  "One other thing."
    "What?"
    "How do I get out of here?"
    McKie faced the giant spoon.  "Good question.  Fanny Mae, how does my companion leave here?"
    "He wishes to journey where?"
    "To his home."
    "Connectives apparent," the Caleban said.
    McKie felt a gush of air.  His ears popped to a change in pressure.  There was a sound like the pulling of a cork from a bottle.  He whirled.  Furuneo was gone.
    "You . . . sent him home?"  McKie asked.
    "Correct," the Caleban said.  "Desired destination visible.  Sent swiftness.  Prevent temperature drop below proper level.  "
    McKie, feeling perspiration roll down his cheeks, said, "I wish I knew how you did that.  Can you actually see our thoughts?"
    "See only strong connectives," the Caleban said.
    Discontinuity of meaning, McKie thought.
    The Caleban's remark about temperature came back to him.  What was a proper temperature level?  Damn!  It was boiling in here!  His skin itched with perspiration.  His throat was dry.  Proper temperature level?
    "What's the opposite of proper?" he asked.
    "False," the Caleban said.

The play of words can lead to certain expectations which life is unable to match.  This is a source of much insanity and other forms of unhappiness.
    -Wreave Saying

    For a reflexive time which he found himself unable to measure, McKie considered his exchange with the Caleban.  He felt cast adrift without any familiar reference points.  How could false be the opposite of proper?  If he could not measure meanings, how could he measure time?
    McKie passed a hand across his forehead, gathering perspiration which he tried to wipe off on his jacket.  The jacket was damp.
    No matter how much time had passed, he felt that he still knew where he was in this universe.  The Beachball's interior walls remained around him.  The unseeable presence of the Caleban had not become less mysterious, but he could look at the shimmering existence of the thing and take a certain satisfaction from the fact that it spoke to him.
    The thought that every sentient who had used a jumpdoor would die if this Caleban succumbed sat on McKie's awareness.  It was muscle-numbing.  His skin was slick with perspiration, and not all of it from the heat.  There were voices of death in this air.  He thought of himself as a being surrounded by all those pleading sentients -- quadrillions upon quadrillions of them.  Help us!
    Everyone who'd used a jumpdoor.
    Damnation of all devils!  Had he interpreted the Caleban correctly?  It was the logical assumption.  Deaths and insanity around the Caleban disappearances said he must exclude any other interpretation.  '
    Link by link, this trap had been forged.  It would crowd the universe with dead flesh.
    The shimmering oval above the giant spoon abruptly waved outward, contracted, flowed up, down, left.  McKie received a definite impression of distress.  The oval vanished, but his eyes still tracked the Caleban's unpresence.
    "Is something wrong?" McKie asked.
    For answer the round vortal tube of a S'eye jumpdoor opened behind the Caleban.  Beyond the opening stood a woman, a figure dwarfed as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope.  McKie recognized her from all the newsvisos and from the holoscans he had been fed as background briefing for this assignment.
    He was confronting Mliss Abnethe in a light somewhat reddened by its slowed passage through the jumpdoor.
    It was obvious that the Beautybarbers of Steadyon had been about their expensive work on her person.  He made a mental note to have that checked.  Her figure presented the youthful curves of a pleasurefem.  The face beneath fairy-blue hair was focused around a red-petal mouth.  Large summery green eyes and a sharply cleaving nose conveyed odd contrast --