ant's shirt. He took out a
thin three-inch disk of metal and said sharply into it,

"Yes?"

A tiny voice squawked from the disk. It was too far from Kieran for him
to understand what it was saying but it had a note of excitement, almost
of panic, in it.

Something changed, hardened, in Vaillant's flat face. He said, "I
expected it. I'll be right there. You know what to do."

He did something to the disk and spoke into it again. "Paula, take over
here."

He stood up. Kieran looked up at him, feeling numb and stupid. "I'd like
to know some things."

"Later," said Vaillant. "We've got troubles. Stay where you are."

He went rapidly out of the room. Kieran looked after him, wondering.
Troubles--troubles in a starship? And a century had passed--

He suddenly felt an emotion that shook his nerves and tightened his
guts. It was beginning to hit him now. He sat up in the bunk and swung
his legs out of it and tried to stand but could not, he was too weak.
All he could do was to sit there, shaking.

His mind could not take it in. It seemed only minutes ago that he had
been walking along the corridor in Wheel Five. It seemed that Wheel Five
must exist, that the Earth, the people, the time he knew, must still be
somewhere out there. This could be some kind of a joke, or some kind of
psychological experiment. That was it--the space-medicine boys were
always making way-out experiments to find out how men would bear up in
unusual conditions, and this must be one of them--

A woman came into the room. She was a dark woman who might have been
thirty years old, and who wore a white shirt and slacks. She would, he
thought, have been good-looking if she had not looked so tired and so
edgy.

She came over and looked down at him and said to him,

"Don't try to get up yet. You'll feel better very soon."

Her voice was a slightly husky one. It was utterly familiar to Kieran,
and yet he had never seen this woman before. Then it came to him.

"You were the one who talked to me," he said, looking up at her. "In the
dreams, I mean."

She nodded. "I'm Paula Ray and I'm a psychologist. You had to be
psychologically prepared for your awakening."

"Prepared?"

The woman explained patiently. "Hypnopedic technique--establishing facts
in the subconscious of a sleeping patient. Otherwise, it would be too
terrific a shock for you when you awakened. That was proved when they
first tried reviving space-struck men, forty or fifty years a