A world took shape around me, and I saw a sea of grass extending as far as the eye could see. A herd of buffalo stretched from horizon to horizon, and something startled what I had thought was a dark undergrowth near the river which ran between two hills of which one served as my rest, and that which had startled launched itself into the air.

Passenger pigeons in fantastic number such that they darkened the sky. I winced feeling certain I was about to be pooped on as the cloud-like mass of beating wings passed overhead.

Instead, I saw the universe distend away from me, and I fell down a long tube of indeterminate nature although it was nothing so commonplace as matter.

I landed in a box, about fifty feet cubed, made of what seemed to be a clear and hard substance. Possibly diamond windowpaning, or transparent aluminum, or ultraplexiglass, or with a snort, I thought, it could be plain old glass.

Grasses covered the bottom of the box, and the air was breathable if slightly rank.

I looked about, and did not find my tube that had brought me here, not that I expected it.

Somehow, I had been captured.

So I readied my weapons, and then spoke up.

“My name is Tadeusz. Who are you? Why did you bring me here? Where is here?”

A long pause, and I felt consideration given to my case, and so I reached out with my mind to contact them, and felt that effort get near instantly slapped down.

Irritated, I aimed my plasma cannon at the wall, but before I could fire it, a purple line of light emerged from empty air, and imprisoned my gun in a ball of energy.

So, I stalked over to the wall, and got ready to use my knife.

“An impulsive and hot-tempered creature, aren’t you?” A voice from the air said. It sounded reproving.

“So far, I don’t see why you, a potential kidnapper, get to make moral judgements on me. So again, who are you, and what are you doing?”

I felt a pause, very like an offended sniff. I crossed my arms in an exzaggerated show of patience.

“We are the Xlorg. A higher species with a great understanding of space-time. Our goal is to understand the Multiverse. In order to do this, we collect visitors from nearby universes such as the one you landed in.

You triggered a collection tube by your arrival. It took you from that universe which had no sentient life to this one, Xlorg Prime.”

“So you do this to other people?”

“Oh, yes. But we try not to damage them, and to return them to their world of origin is they desire.”

“Can you take me back to my homeworld?” I asked with sudden enthusiasm.

“No. We can take you back to where we found you. In fact, we have no idea what your home planet is like, or even what species you are.”

“I’m human, and a verser.” I said with a sigh.

The interview took nearly two hours, but the Xlorg pronounced themselves satisfied, and they updated their Multiversal Species Guide by adding Human in between Huk-til-Nak and Hundra.

Another tube took me out of my cage, and deposited me in their Lower City.

Ten million sapients from five hundred seventy-two different species, and I was the only human in the bunch. There were a number of versers, I could tell, but right at the moment, I just wanted to relax and recover.

So I found an eatery, and programmed my table to produce something edible, even if it tasted bland and odd. Tne meal was like crossing overcooked broccoli with burnt popcorn.

About half the eaters had sight shields up, and I saw the point of that. Too much alienness and the brain just refuses to cope with it. This was a continual problem for versers as we jumped from universe to universe, but especially so here.

Tired, I put up my shields after the first hour.

I did not know where to go since everything looked so bizzarre as to hurt my eyes. So I just sat at that table for several hours in a kind of emotional stasis until the Texlorican moved the shields aside, and joined me at the table.

A bit of description is in order. Ten feet tall, dark mud brown with a rough integument (I cannot call it a ’skin’), and four arms plus a prehensile tail, and it was obviously predatory since it had spiked teeth in its head.

“Buck up, mate. You’re a verser, right?”

He spoke in a New Yawk accent.

And I looked up, suddenly gladdened.

“You’ve been to Earth?”

“Well one of them. Worked for Barnum and Bailey circus as a sideshow freak for over ten years. Lots of fun. You humans look weird with your eyes bugging out as your kind tried to figure out how I’d been faked up. Heh.”

No doubt he thought I looked funny now, but I was glad to see him. It turned out that he had a flag for a number of species in the Guidebook, and if any of them arrived, he tried to track them down, but especially so if they were versers like him.

We talked about worlds, and at one point I asked him if he had met a verser (by which I’d meant a human), and gotten a blood exchange.

He just smacked me on the shoulder.

“Bucko, you’re not thinking large enough. I’d been to nearly forty worlds before I met my first human.”

I nodded expanding my mental horizons a bit.

It turned out his species made the most glad-handingest Human politician look like an antisocial sort, and he literally had a list of friends longer than all his arms.

And he would go out of the way to help any of them day or night. I’m not sure how he coped with all that, but he did, and he enjoyed it with a gusto that broke me loose from my depression.

And soon enough, I found a job in a neighbouring universe that the Xlorg maintained a gate with. I would be a bodyguard for a reporter in a war zone.

Tadeusz
P.S. Next week is WAW: Bodyguard which follows this one up.