As best he could tell, he was in a sort of room no bigger than a prison cell. Perhaps it was a prison cell. Whatever it was, he had no business in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. McCray was ship's navigator, plotting course corrections—not that there were any, ever; but the reason there were none was that the check-sightings were made every hour of the long flight. He had read off the azimuth angles from the computer sights, automatically locked on their beacon1 stars, and found them correct; then out of long habit confirmed the locking mechanism2 visually. It was only a personal quaintness3; he had done it a thousand times. And while he was looking at Betelgeuse, Rigel and Saiph ... it happened.
The room was totally dark, and it seemed to be furnished with a collection of hard, sharp, sticky and knobby objects of various shapes and a number of inconvenient4 sizes. McCray tripped over something that rocked under his feet and fell against something that clattered5 hollowly. He picked himself up, braced6 against something that smelled dangerously of halogen compounds, and scratched his shoulder, right through his space-tunic, against something that vibrated as he touched it.
McCray had no idea where he was, and no way to find out.
Not only was he in darkness, but in utter silence as well. No. Not quite utter silence.
Somewhere, just at the threshold of his senses, there was something like a voice. He could not quite hear it, but it was there. He sat as still as he could, listening; it remained elusive7.
Probably it was only an illusion.
But the room itself was hard fact. McCray swore violently and out loud.
It was crazy and impossible. There simply was no way for him to get from a warm, bright navigator's cubicle8 on Starship Jodrell Bank to this damned, dark, dismal9 hole of a place where everything was out to hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. He cried aloud in exasperation10: "If I could only see!"
He tripped and fell against something that was soft, slimy and, like baker's dough11, not at all resilient.
A flickering12 halo of pinkish light appeared. He sat up, startled. He was looking at something that resembled a suit of medieval armor.
It was, he saw in a moment, not armor but a spacesuit. But what was the light? And what were these other things in the room?
Wherever he looked, the light danced along with his eyes. It was like having tunnel vision or wearing blinders. He could see what he was looking at, but he could see nothing else. And the things he could see made no sense. A spacesuit, yes; he knew that he could construct a logical explanation for that with no trouble—maybe a subspace meteorite13 striking the Jodrell Bank, an explosion, himself knocked out, brought here in a suit ... well, it was an explanation with more holes than fabric14, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational.
How to explain a set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? A space-ax? Or the old-fashioned child's rocking-chair, the chemistry set—or, most of all, the scrap15 of gaily16 printed fabric that, when he picked it up, turned out to be a girl's scanty17 bathing suit? It was slightly reassuring18, McCray thought, to find that most of the objects were more or less familiar. Even the child's chair—why, he'd had one more or less like that himself, long before he was old enough to go to school. But what were they doing here?
Not everything he saw was familiar. The walls of the room itself were strange. They were not metal or plaster or knotty19 pine; they were not papered, painted or overlaid with stucco. They seemed to be made of some sort of hard organic compound, perhaps a sort of plastic or processed cellulose. It was hard to tell colors in the pinkish light. But they seemed to have none. They were "neutral"—the color of aged20 driftwood or unbleached cloth.
Three of the walls were that way, and the floor and ceiling. The fourth wall was something else. Areas in it had the appearance of gratings; from them issued the pungent21, distasteful halogen odor. They might be ventilators, he thought; but if so the air they brought in was worse than what he already had.
McCray was beginning to feel more confident. It was astonishing how a little light made an impossible situation bearable, how quickly his courage flowed back when he could see again.
He stood still, thinking. Item, a short time ago—subjectively it seemed to be minutes—he had been aboard the Jodrell Bank with nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting one of the female passengers for coffee. Item, apart from being shaken up and—he admitted it—scared damn near witless, he did not seem to be hurt. Item, wherever he was now, it became, not so much what had happened to him, but what had happened to the ship?
He allowed that thought to seep22 into his mind. Suppose there had been an accident to the Jodrell Bank.
He could, of course, be dead. All this could be the fantasies of a cooling brain.
McCray grinned into the pink-lit darkness. The thought had somehow refreshed him, like icewater between rounds, and with a clearing head he remembered what a spacesuit was good for.
It held a radio.
He pressed the unsealing tabs, slipped his hand into the vacant chest of the suit and pulled out the hand mike. "This is Herrell McCray," he said, "calling the Jodrell Bank."
No response. He frowned. "This is Herrell McCray, calling Jodrell Bank.
"Herrell McCray, calling anybody, come in, please."
But there was no answer.
Thoughtfully he replaced the microphone. This was ultrawave radio, something more than a million times faster than light, with a range measured, at least, in hundreds of light-years. If there was no answer, he was a good long way from anywhere.
Of course, the thing might not be operating.
He reached for the microphone again—
He cried aloud.
The pinkish lights went out. He was in the dark again, worse dark than before.
For before the light had gone, McCray had seen what had escaped his eyes before. The suit and the microphone were clear enough in the pinkish glimmer23; but the hand—his own hand, cupped to hold the microphone—he had not seen at all. Nor his arm. Nor, in one fleeting24 moment of study, his chest.
McCray could not see any part of his own body at all.
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1
beacon
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| n.烽火，（警告用的）闪火灯，灯塔 | |
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2
mechanism
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| n.机械装置；机构，结构 | |
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3
quaintness
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| n.离奇有趣，古怪的事物 | |
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4
inconvenient
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| adj.不方便的，令人感到麻烦的 | |
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5
clattered
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| 发出咔哒声（clatter的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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6
braced
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| adj.拉牢的v.支住( brace的过去式和过去分词 )；撑牢；使自己站稳；振作起来 | |
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7
elusive
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| adj.难以表达(捉摸)的；令人困惑的；逃避的 | |
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8
cubicle
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| n.大房间中隔出的小室 | |
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9
dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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10
exasperation
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| n.愤慨 | |
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11
dough
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| n.生面团；钱，现款 | |
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12
flickering
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| adj.闪烁的，摇曳的，一闪一闪的 | |
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13
meteorite
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| n.陨石；流星 | |
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14
fabric
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| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
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15
scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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16
gaily
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| adv.欢乐地，高兴地 | |
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17
scanty
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| adj.缺乏的，仅有的，节省的，狭小的，不够的 | |
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18
reassuring
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| a.使人消除恐惧和疑虑的，使人放心的 | |
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knotty
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| adj.有结的，多节的，多瘤的，棘手的 | |
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20
aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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21
pungent
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| adj.（气味、味道）刺激性的，辛辣的；尖锐的 | |
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22
seep
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| v.渗出，渗漏；n.渗漏，小泉，水（油）坑 | |
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23
glimmer
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| v.发出闪烁的微光；n.微光，微弱的闪光 | |
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24
fleeting
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| adj.短暂的，飞逝的 | |
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