Transit

As a human being--an Earthman--Richard Avery was not particularly successful. He was mediocre as a teacher, and a failure as an artist. The rewards of Earth had passed him by. - Still...Earth was home. It was where he belonged, where he could at least go his way unnoticed. Until that afternoon in Kensington Gardens, and that gleaming, hypnotic crystal that transported him--instantaneously--to a new and alien world. 79 light years from earth... This is home. This is the garden. This is the world where you will live and grow and understand. This is where you will discover enough, but not too much. This is where life is. It is yours. Richard Avery awoke with those words ringing in his mind. He was not alone, at least. There were three other Earth people marooned with him, all without a hint of the location or reason. And four more oddly assorted individuals would have been hard to imagine... At first he thought that he and the three strangers with whom he found himself were the subjects in some weirdly alien experiment in human psychology. Then he discovered the Others - The Golden Ones. They thought the object of the experiment was to kill humans!