He fought frantically to break loose. His mind screamed, No! If you go to sleep now you'll never....
He was wrong.
His first waking sensation was delicious comfort. He felt good all over. He came a little more awake and his spaceman's mind began to reason: There's light gravity, and I'm supported by the armpits. No acceleration. I'm breathing something heavier than air, but it feels good in my lungs, and tastes good.
His eyelids unlocked themselves, and the shock of seeing was like a knife in his middle.
He was buried in the ice, looking out at the place where he and Waverill had stayed. He was far into the ice and could only see distortedly. Between him and the open were various things; rocks, eroded artifacts. At the edge of his vision on the right was a vaguely animal shape.
Terror made him struggle to turn his head. He couldn't; he was encased in something just tight enough to hold him. His nose and mouth were free, and a draft of the cloying atmosphere moved past them so that he could breath. There was enough space before his eyes for him to see the stuff swirling like a heavy fog. He thought, I'm being fed by what I breathe. I don't feel hungry. In horror, he forced the stuff out of his lungs. It was hard to exhale. He resisted taking any back in, but eventually he had to give up and then he fought to get it in. He tried to cry out, but the sound was a muffled nothing.
He yielded to panic and struggled for a while without accomplishing anything, except that he found that his casing did yield, very slowly, if he applied pressure long enough. That brought a little sanity, and he relaxed again until the exhaustion wore off.
There was movement in the vague shape at his right, and he felt a compulsion to see it more plainly. Even after it was in his vision, horrified fascination kept him straining until his head was turned toward it.
It was alive; obscenely alive, a caricature of parts of a man. There was no proper skin, but an ugly translucent membrane covered it. The whole was encased as Murdoch himself must be, and from the casing several pipes stretched back into the dark ice. The legs were entirely gone, and only stubs of arms remained, sufficient for the thing to hang from in its casing. Bloated lungs pulsed slowly, breathing in and out a misty something like what Murdoch breathed. The stomach was shrunken to a small repugnant sack, hanging at the bottom with what might be things evolved from liver and kidneys. Blood moved from the lungs through the loathsome mess, pumped by an overgrown heart that protruded from between the lungs. A little blood circulated up to what had once been the head. The skull was gone. The nose and mouth were one round hole where the nutrient vapor puffed in and out. The brain showed horrible and shrunk through the membrane. A pair of lidless idiot eyes stared unmovingly in Murdoch's direction. The whole jawless head was the size of Murdoch's two fists doubled up, if he could judge the size through the distortion of the ice.