They didn't belong up here, not this way.
"The cooling system's clogging," he heard himself whisper. "Crystals of ice ... cockpit's like a miniature snow storm...."
He heard the unemotional voice come clearly to him. "The emergency trigger—"
He used it. He felt a freezing grin rip across his face as he reached out and used it. The icy spray died away and he heard himself saying something else.
"It's the velocity. I don't have any reason for saying it—I just feel it—you could feel it up here too—I can't explain it, but it's the velocity. I know it. Maybe they crashed on the Earth somewhere. There's lots of places on Earth a ship could crash and no one would know it, especially when it would be taken for a meteor. But this feels like it's the velocity that does it up here. Listen, what about this? Anyone thought of this—what if the velocity breaks a man through into another dimension?"
No one commented on that. It happened to him right then, and he felt it coming. Reflexes tried to move his body, and his head and feet drummed on the restricting tubular walls. There was a wrenching blur and a slipping spinning vertigo.
... there was darkness and he floated in it, but he was conscious. It wasn't any familiar kind of consciousness. Lights began glimmering here and there like fireflies. But it was no dream, he knew that. He didn't know what it was. The music that was something far and incomprehensively beyond music sounded, and he seemed to float on a broad tape of sound to float on a road, a path, a curvature that broadened into unlimited vistas.
It was brief. It was like peeking through a tiny hole and seeing something beautiful, unworldly, very nearly incomprehensible, drift by. He heard a voice that had no body, but he knew it was real, very real. More real than anything he had called real before.
"Another is coming through. Check the matrix."