Meanwhile, where the devil was he?
From where he was sitting, he could see that the room was fairly large, but not extraordinarily so. A door in one wall led into another room of about the same size. But they were like no other rooms he had ever seen before. He looked down at the floor. It was soft, almost as soft as a bed, covered with a thick, even, resilient layer of fine material of some kind. It was some sort of carpeting that covered the floor from wall to wall, but no carpet had ever felt like this.
He lifted himself gingerly to his feet. He wasn't hurt, at least. He felt fine, except for the gaps in his memory.
The room was well lit. The illumination came from the ceiling, which seemed to be made of some glowing, semitranslucent metal that cast a shadowless glow over everything. There was a large, bulky table near the wall away from the door; it looked almost normal, except that the objects on it were like nothing that had ever existed. Their purposes were unknown, and their shapes meaningless.
He jerked his head away, not wanting to look at the things on the table.
The walls, at least, looked familiar. They seemed to be paneled in some fine wood. He walked over and touched it.
And knew immediately that, no matter what it looked like, it wasn't wood. The illusion was there to the eye, but no wood ever had such a hard, smooth, glasslike surface as this. He jerked his fingertips away.
He recognized, then, the emotion that had made him turn away from the objects on the table and pull his hand away from the unnatural wall. It was fear.
Fear? Nonsense! He put his hand out suddenly and slapped the wall with his palm and held it there. There was nothing to be afraid of!
He laughed at himself softly. He'd faced death a hundred times during the war without showing fear; this was no time to start. What would his men think of him if they saw him getting shaky over the mere touch of a woodlike wall?