* * * * *

Broom sat up abruptly and looked around him. The room was totally
unfamiliar. For a moment, that seemed perfectly understandable. Why
shouldn't the room look odd, after he had gone through--

What?

He rubbed his head and looked around more carefully. It was not just
that the room itself was unfamiliar as a whole; the effect was greater
than that. It was not the first time in his life he had regained
consciousness in unfamiliar surroundings, but always before he had been
aware that only the pattern was different, not the details.

He sat there on the floor and took stock of himself and his
surroundings.

He was a big man--six feet tall when he stood up, and proportionately
heavy, a big-boned frame covered with hard, well-trained muscles. His
hair and beard were a dark blond, and rather shaggy because of the time
he'd spent in prison.

Prison!

Yes, he'd been in prison. The rough clothing he was wearing was
certainly nothing like the type of dress he was used to.

He tried to force his memory to give him the information he was looking
for, but it wouldn't come. A face flickered in his mind for a moment,
and a name. Contarini. He seemed to remember a startled look on the
Italian's face, but he could neither remember the reason for it nor when
it had been. But it would come back; he was sure of that.

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 tab