Like stars, he thought.
Stars? STARS!
With a sudden rush, total awareness came back to him, and he realized with awful clarity where he was.
He was chained, spread-eagled, on an asteroid in the Penal Cluster, nearly a hundred million miles from Earth.
It was easy to piece together what had happened. He dimly remembered that he had started to wake up once before. It was a vague, confused recollection, but he knew what had taken place.
The PD Police, coming in response to his call, had found all four men unconscious from the effects of the stun beam. Naturally, all of them had been taken into custody; the PD Police had to find out which one of the men was the Controller and which the controlled. That could easily be tested by waiting until they began to wake up; the resulting mental disturbances would easily identify the telepath.
Houston could imagine the consternation that must have resulted when the PD men found that all three suspects—and their brother officer—were Controllers.
And now here he was—tried, convicted, and sentenced while he was unconscious—doomed to spend the rest of his life chained to a rock floating in space.
A sudden chill of terror came over him. Why wasn't he asleep? Why wasn't he under hibernene?
It's their way of being funny, came a bitter thought. We're supposed to be under hibernene, but we're left to die, instead.