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 elusive.
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 cubicle on Starship Jodrell Bank to this damned, dark, dismal hole of a place where everything was out to hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. He cried aloud in exasperation: "If I could only see!"
He tripped and fell against something that was soft, slimy and, like baker's dough, not at all resilient.
A flickering 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 meteorite striking the Jodrell Bank, an explosion, himself knocked out, brought here in a suit ... well, it was an explanation with more holes than fabric, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational.