Her voice was a slightly husky one. It was utterly familiar to Kieran, and yet he had never seen this woman before. Then it came to him.
"You were the one who talked to me," he said, looking up at her. "In the dreams, I mean."
She nodded. "I'm Paula Ray and I'm a psychologist. You had to be psychologically prepared for your awakening."
"Prepared?"
The woman explained patiently. "Hypnopedic technique—establishing facts in the subconscious of a sleeping patient. Otherwise, it would be too terrific a shock for you when you awakened. That was proved when they first tried reviving space-struck men, forty or fifty years ago."
The comfortable conviction that this was all a fake, an experiment of some kind, began to drain out of Kieran. But if it was true—
He asked, with some difficulty, "You say that they found out how to revive space-frozen men, that long ago?"
"Yes."
"Yet it took forty or fifty years to get around to reviving me?"