Farradyne awoke to the pressure of about one-gravity and began to wonder how far the Lancaster had carried him under its jury-rigged drive. His watch said that fourteen hours had passed since weightlessness had come, but this was no good for an estimate of distance.
The whole thing was incomprehensible to him. Interstellar travel in a matter of hours made his mind reel, and the idea of installing a gadget that made it possible with the ease of installing a radio in an automobile only added to the inconsistencies. All he could grasp of it was that the gadget the alien race had must be some sort of force-field generator that worked independently of the basic reaction motor and therefore could be turned off or on at will. He gave up trying to theorize and began to consider the more personal problem of his location and what he could do.
He cracked the scuttlebutt and found that the ship was a-planet. He listened and heard nothing, not even the familiar sounds of a ship in warm-up. He cracked the hatch of his cubby and looked out. The small corridor was as dark as the grave, and as silent. Boldly he stepped out and looked around under the light of his spacesuit torch.
Bolted to the floor were four rectangular boxes of metal connected together by a heavy cable, and from one a second cable ran to a standard connector set in the wall of the Lancaster.
Like all other Solarian spacecraft, the Lancaster was well-supplied with a network of cables running up and down the length of the ship to serve as test connections and spares for this or that equipment when needed. So the enemy had re-connected their multi-line cable to one of the standard Terran connectors and plugged the cable into the Lancaster's cable-plate.
Farradyne could see nothing about the metal boxes that would tell him anything, so he left them and went aloft, cautiously. He doffed the spacesuit at the next level and hung it neatly in a suit locker, before he continued up the stairways.
Out of one porthole he could see the spaceport. It was broad and dark except for a bouquet of searchlights that drilled into the sky around the rim, a wash of floodlamps that surrounded one of the vast starships a mile or so distant, and the far-off blurs of bright red light that probably read "Spaceman's Bar" in whatever the enemy used for a printed language.
He left the viewport and went higher until he came to the salon. He peered into it from floor level, but it was dark and untenanted. The spacelock was open and Farradyne looked out of the big round opening across the field to another huge starship standing a few hundred yards from the Lancaster. The other ship was as dark as the Lancaster, except for one small porthole that gleamed like a headlight in the darkness.
The problem of where he was sent him to the control room. He looked into the sky, hunting for familiar constellations. The Pleiades were there, but warped, and Farradyne found that while he knew they were distorted as an aggregation of stellar positions, he could not remember their proper relationship. Orion was visible, but the hero had hiked his belt up. The Great Bear was sitting on his haunches, and the Smaller Bear had lost his front feet. Sirius no longer blazed in Canis Major. Procyon had taken off for parts unknown, while several other bright stars dotted the skies in places where no stars had been on Terra.
He tried to recall visits to the big stellatarium in New York where the lecturer displayed the skies as seen from various well-known stars that were within a half-hundred light years of Sol; but he found that he evidently had not been as attentive as he might have been.