Quentin’s first term of Fourth Year is almost complete. However, “the mystery of the Fourth Year” (134) remains unsolved; Quentin does not know why half the students disappear overnight at the beginning of term, and suddenly return at the end of term. No one will talk about it, and Quentin has not been able to glean any information about what happens to them. Now, it’s the Physical Kids who will “be shipping out together in January” (135).

Professors come for the Physical Kids and ten other Fourth- and Fifth-Year students “one night in January” (136). They are taken to the roof and told to remove their clothes. Professor Van der Weghe dabs some “chalky white paste on each forehead and both shoulders” (137) and then utters “a single harsh syllable” (137). Moments later, Quentin and Alice are looking at one another; both have been transformed into geese, along with all of the other students in the group.

The students then fly, following the coast down from New York, “past Trenton and Philadelphia” (139), past “Chesapeake Bay” (139)—farther and farther south, “over the Florida Keys” (140) and “over the Caribbean” (140), then crossing “the Panama Canal” (140) and flying over South America—the Andes and “the grassy, wind-ruffled Patagonian pampas” (140) of Chile.