Jerry's main concern, however, was for the fate of the crystalloid creature, lying so still upon the table. One of the medics undid the straps across the body, lifted it by a hind leg and shoved it through a hinged metal flap against the wall, then stabbed a button....
A red flare went off beyond the still oscillating metal flap, and Jerry had all the information he needed. A nice little incinerator, for hollowed-out corpses.
"I wonder," Jerry thought dismally, "how long my forty minutes will take in this Contact!" His headache was growing worse, and it wasn't just from the lights.
At that moment, a sudden lurch sent him crashing against the wall of the cage. A clamor of alarm bells began throughout the vessel.
One of the medics yelled something, and threw a switch against the wall opposite that housing the anesthetizing machine. A panel slid away, revealing a large mosaic of close-packed little spheroids. As the medic twisted a dial at the base of this arrangement, some of the spheroids began to flicker whitely, while others remained dark.
Then Jerry recognized it for what it was. A form of television screen, composed of individual lights instead of phosphorescing dots activated by magnetically guided electrons from a cathode. The effect was the same.
A picture, sharply etched by the alternation and varying intensities of the bulbs, appeared on the mosaic-screen. Across the dream-like surging of the black-gray-and-white heavy seas in the foreground, Jerry made out an armada of strange-looking vessels coming across the ocean toward wherever the pickup camera lay. Unlike Earth-vessels, they tapered inward as the sides of the vessels rose from the waters, then were abruptly truncated near what would have been a peak by a railinged area that was the deck.
"Unless I'm much mistaken," thought Jerry, grimly, "I am on a ship which—be it alone or one of many in a convoy—is about to be attacked by those vessels out there."
A second later he knew he was right.