ied away.

Kieran wanted to follow her but his knees were buckling under him. He
hung to the side of the door-opening. He felt angry, and anger was all
that kept him from falling over. He would not faint, he told himself. He
was not a child, and would not be treated like one--

He got his head outside the door. There was a long and very narrow
corridor out there, blank metal with a few closed doors along it. One
door, away down toward the end of the corridor, was just sliding shut.

* * * * *

He started down the corridor, steadying himself with his hand against
the smooth wall. Before he had gone more than a few steps, the anger
that pushed him began to ebb away. Of a sudden, the mountainous and
incredible fact of his being here, in this place, this time, this ship,
came down on him like an avalanche from which the hypnopedic
pre-conditioning would no longer protect him.

_I am touching a starship, I am in a starship, I, Reed Kieran of Midland
Springs, Ohio. I ought to be back there, teaching my classes, stopping
at Hartnett's Drug Store for a soft drink on the way home, but I am here
in a ship fleeing through the stars ..._

His head was spinning and he was afraid that he was going to go out
again. He found himself at the door and slid it open and fell rather
than walked inside. He heard a startled voice.

This was a bigger room. There was a table whose top was translucent and
which showed a bewildering mass of fleeting symbols in bright light,
ever changing. There was a screen on one wall of the room and that
showed nothing, a blank, dark surface.

Vaillant and Paula Ray and a tall, tough-looking man of middle age were
around the table and had looked up, surprised.

Vaillant's face flashed irritation. "Paula, you were supposed to keep
him in his cabin!"

"I didn't think he was strong enough to follow," she said.

"I'm not," said Kieran, and pitched over.

The tall middle-aged man reached and caught him before he hit the floor,
and eased him into a chair.

He heard, as though from a great distance, Vaillant's voice saying
irritatedly, "Let Paula take care of him, Webber. Look at this--we're
going to cross another rift--"

There were a few minutes then when everything was very jumbled up in
Kieran's mind. The woman was talking to him. She was telling him that
they had prepared him physically, as well as psychologically, for the
shock of revival, and that he would be quite