He freed his arm, stepped out into the corridor, and closed the lock behind him.
An hour later, his ship passed through a Lambda-Xi field.
At least Drake thought it was a Lambda-Xi field. Certainly its effect upon himself and the Fly by Night fitted the hypothetical description given in section 3, chapter 9 of The Pilot's Handbook—a prose-work which all spacemen were required to know by heart. The bulkheads "shimmered"; the artificial atmosphere took on a "haze-like aspect"; the deck "desolidified". As for Drake himself, he experienced a "painful prickling of nerve-ends and a slight vertigo". Then translucence—"the prelude to total disintegration" came to ship and master alike.
The handbook went on to state that in view of the fact that no one had ever passed through a Lambda-Xi field and survived, all knowledge pertaining to the preliminary effects of such a passage had had to be extrapolated. It then added reassuringly that since such fields were exceedingly rare, the danger they represented was virtually negligible. The handbook said nothing, however, about any handwriting on the wall. Handwriting there was, though, just the same. Standing in his ship, through the translucent bulkheads and hull of which he could make out the stars, Drake read the single word:
DEATH.
And yet death did not come. Neither did total disintegration—if a distinction can be drawn. The Fly by Night went right on being translucent, and so did Nathaniel Drake.
He took a tentative step. He took another. The deck supported him, even though he could look down through it and through the decks beneath it and through the hull and dimly see the stars—yes, and in the nearer distance, the green globe of Iago Iago. He raised his hand, and found that he could see through his flesh too. He got a mirror and hung it on the wall and stared into his translucent face. He could see right through his reflected eyes to the reflected wall behind him. He could see right through his reflected cheeks and chin. Looking down at himself, he found that he could see through his body. Through his clothes. The translucence was such that the combination of clothes and flesh cancelled out nakedness; nevertheless, his spaceshoes and his spaceslacks and his thigh-length spacecoat were as unquestionably spectral as he was.
