For a time, he thought that all matter had vanished from the universe, that only he and his lifeboat existed in all the great void. Later, he thought that light itself had vanished. Telescopically, in any direction, he could have found light, but to his unaided eyes all darkness was the same. Then came the weirder illusions of other senses, that his course followed no straight line or sane curves, but moved endlessly upon some infinite spiral.
Time passed, and his eyes grew so accustomed to darkness that they did not see the light when it appeared. Ahead, just a faint point, steady, steel-hard, unwinking, it emerged from the blackness. Slowly it increased in radiance rather than in size. Then at last it was a disk, like a beacon set out to guide him in.
There was a beam, invisible with nothing to reflect its tight radiance or diffuse it. But as before, when leaving his own ship, he avoided the beam.
Cruising closer, Braun began to make out details.
It was a ship, no doubt about that. A phantom glow hovered about its forward compartments as if the metallic shell caught and reflected faint light from a distant source. It was a ship, all right. A ship painfully like the Venture IV. A philosopher might have meditated upon parallel evolutions, but Braun was too deeply shocked for delvings into the deeper relations between man and his environments.
The alien ship was identical. Braun satisfied himself of that by circling, studying every aspect of the stranger. There was the same indefinable quality which stamped it as man-made.
Almost hysterical with his discovery, Braun nerved himself to switch off the automatic pilot and take over manual controls. Then he eased in quickly beside an air lock which might have been the same one he had left. Magnetic grapnels reached out from the lifeboat, caught and dragged the lesser mass to the greater. At the controls, Braun guided his tiny craft to the airlock valve, and the outer doors slid shut and locked hermetically behind him.
Some kind of atmosphere would be hissing into the valve now, building up pressure. It had to work like that.
Almost beside himself, Braun crawled into a spacesuit, then settled back to wait impatiently.