Days passed, and Thomakein unwillingly abandoned any hope of having this man give him any information. The man was as one dead. He could not speak, nor could he understand anything. Thomakein decided that the best thing to do was to take the unknown man to Ertene with him. Perhaps Charalas, or one of his contemporary neuro-surgeons could bring this man to himself. Thomakein diagnosed the illness as some sort of nerve shock though he knew that he was no man of medicine.
Yet the surgeons of Ertene were brilliant, and if they could bring this unknown man to himself, they would have a gold mine indeed.
So at the proper time, Thomakein took off from the derelict with the mindless Guy Maynard. By now, the derelict was far beyond the last outpost of the Solar System and obviously beyond detection. Thomakein installed a repeater-circuit detector in the wrecked ship; it would enable him to find the Mardinex at some later time.
So unknowing, Guy Maynard came to Ertene.
The first thing that reached across the mental gap to Guy Maynard was music. Faint, elfin music that seemed to sway and soothe the ragged edges of his mind. It came and it went depending on how he felt.
But gradually the music increased in strength and power, and the lapses were shorter. Warm pleasant light assailed him now and gave him a feeling of bodily well-being. Flashes of clear thinking found him considering the satisfied condition of his body, and the fear and nerve-racking torture of the Martian method of extracting information dropped deeper and deeper into the region of forgetfulness.
Then he realized, one day, that he was being fed. It made him ashamed to be fed at his age, but the thought was fleeting and gone before he could clutch at it and consider why he should be ashamed. One portion of his mind cursed the fleetingness of such thoughts and recognized the possibilities that might lie in the sheer contemplation of self.
There were periods in which someone spoke to him in a strange tongue. It was a throaty voice; a woman. Maynard's inquisitive section tried the problem of what was a woman and why it should stir the rest of him and came to the meager conclusion that it was standard for this body to be stirred by woman: especially women with throaty voices. The tongue was alien; he could understand none of it. But the tones were soothing and pleasant, and they seemed to imply that he should try to understand their meaning.
And then the wonder of meaning came before that alert part of Maynard's mind. What is meaning? it asked. Must things have meaning? It decided that meaning must have some place in the body's existence. It reasoned thus: There is light. Then what is the meaning of light? Must light have a meaning? It must have some importance. Then if light has importance and meaning, so must all things!
Even self!