Page 33 (1/2)

Don Merriam had eaten and slept once more in his tiny cabin aboard the Wanderer, when he ith a feeling of great inner clarity He gazed tranquilly at the neutral-colored ceiling as it lightened

He did not feel the bed under him and was barely aware of his body - the little nerve es of touch and tension were at a minimum Insofar as he could tell at all, he was stretched on his back with his arht and relaxed at his sides

Suddenly he was filled with a boundless curiosity about the great ship on which he was an involuntary passenger His whole being was suffused with the yearning to know, or if that were i was ris

Without warning, the ceiling swiftly descended toward him

He tried to throw himself off the bed, but the only result was that he turned over, very s shower area that he was about six feet above the in the air, first on his back, now on his face, two feet below the ceiling

His chin was tipped forward and his head bent back, though without any sensation of strain, so that his vision was directed straight ahead, like the point of a spear He couldn&039;t look down at any part of the bed beneath hih he tried to, because he wanted to knohether he would see his body lying there - whether a real body or a body in a drea his hands in front of his face to look at them Either he was unable to feel and move his arms, or else he had none

He couldn&039;t tell whether he had a real body up here, or even a drea viewpoint with an iined body behind it

One bit of evidence for the last: he couldn&039;t seees of nose and brow and cheek that one nornores But perhaps that was only because his vision was directed so fiercely forward

All at once he began to ht toward the wall He flinched his eyes shut - he could do that, at least, or somehow momentarily turn off his vision - and when he opened theh there had been no blow, not the least sensation of resistance, he was flying rapidly along a silver corridor etched with arabesques and hieroglyphs It opened alreat pits or wells, and with a sudden rush of exultation he plunged down

In this way there began for Don Merriaht be pure vivid dream, or a dream induced in him by his captor-hosts, or a clairvoyant extrasensory experience presented to hi dream, or even - and this was how it felt - that his body had been made perfectly permeable to all walls and airs and other barriers by an alien physics and cheravity and all other ordinary forces, and whirled and swooped about, half involuntarily yet guided to a degree by its htmare journey

Or perhaps, it occurred to hile instant, outside time

Don Merriained other, was the basis of his experience He could only flit and plummet and see

At first his movements were lis or pera machines or small ships in them, they were blurred to invisibility by the speed of his passage The rule was that for a few instants he would travel aleneral shape and attitude of the passageway he was traversing; then he would float rather slowly for a brief space, able to glimpse all that was iain, in part involuntarily, in part because an i else would take hold This process went on interh time were unlimitedly telescoped

Gradually the three-dimensional picture firlobe within globe of floors - fifty thousand of them at least - everywhere veined with corridors, like a vast silvery sponge Many of the great wells did go all the way through the planet, intersecting at its center in an i with randohts like stars between the mile-wide holes of the pits with their darkness and their softly glihtedly with its increasing grip on the structure of the Wanderer, one feature of the planet oppressed and then began to frighten him, more by its implications than by its simple nature: the thirty-yard-thick skin of dark metal that was its silver-filround on which the Baba Yaga and the Soviet moon ship had landed - and theacross theup the planet like a fortress

Re-enforcing this particular o soht so inward froain in the very center of the star-speckled, central iht be only twenty reat holes in its starry sky doorways to other universes, and he felt that there were invisible beings around hialactic depths of space, and this engendered in him a sudden fear sharper than had the planet&039;s defensive skin

It was perhaps this sharper fear that launched his winging vision on its second exploration of the Wanderer He no longer stuck to corridors, but flashed without flinching through wall after wall, aware of the thickest of theh room after roos These living beings were not of one sort, but h felinoids or cat-people like his conductor fore minority of the Wanderer&039;s crew, especially near the planet&039;s surface, there were beings that seemed an end product of almost every line of terrestrial evolution, and unearthly lines, too: great-headed horses with organs of iant, tranquil-eyed spiders pulsing at their joints with a strongly purasping tentacles; glintingly scaled and gorgeously crested hu like thick wheels with a counter-rotating central brain and sensoriu squid that stood proudly on three or six tentacles; and beings seely inspired by such creatures of myth as the basilisk and the harpy These last Don found deep in the planet, winging about in a roo that it occupied many floors - an interior world - was grown over with slihted by a dozen great floating lalia were as deep as they ide, and in thereat-eyed and presuered at the ends with filaent, s

Don wanted to stop and study all of these beings, observe their actions in detail, but always the urge to see soreater, with the result that his pauses were hardly longer than when he had been hurtling along the es he observed appear to be aware of his presence

None of the life forms seemed to keep racial privacy: there had been a few cat-people engaged in apparently amicable converse with the siant spiders arh one of the deep lakes of the whales

It began to sees he was spying on could be held by an Earth-size planet, but then it occurred to him that with her decks the Wanderer had about 15,000 times the surface area of Earth