The Stars, My Brothers

Vaillant interrupted his stammering question. 'As to where, we're quite a way from Earth, heading right now in the general direction of Altair. As to how—' He paused, looking keenly down at Kieran. 'Don't you know how?'

Of course I know. I was frozen, and now I have been awakened and time has gone by—

Vaillant, looking searchingly down at his face, showed a trace of relief. 'You do know, don't you? For a moment I was afraid it hadn't worked.'

He sat down on the edge of the bunk.

'How long?' asked Kieran.

Vaillant answered as casually as though it was the most ordinary question in the world. 'A bit over a century.'

It was wonderful, thought Kieran, how he could take a statement like that without getting excited. It was almost as though he'd known it all the time.

'How—' he began, when there was an interruption.

Something buzzed thinly in the pocket of Vaillant'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 ago.'

The comfortable conviction that this was all a fake, an experiment of some kind, began to drain out of Kieran. But if it was true—

He asked, with some difficulty, 'You say that they found out how to revive space-frozen men, that long ago?'

'Yes.'

'Yet it took forty or fifty years to get around to reviving me?'

The woman sighed. 'You have a misconception. The process of revival was perfected that long ago. But it has been used only immediately after a wreck or disaster. Men or women in the old space-cemeteries have not been revived.'

'Why not?' he asked carefully.

'Unsatisfactory results,' she said. 'They could not adjust psychologically to changed conditions. They usually became unbalanced. Some suicides and a number of cases of extreme schizophrenia resulted. It was decided that it was no kindness to the older space-struck cases to bring them back.'

'But you brought me back?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'There were good reasons.' She was, clearly, evading that question. She went on quickly. 'The psychological shock of awakening would have been devastating, if you were not prepared. So, while you were still under sedation, I used the hypnopedic method on you. Your unconscious was aware of the main facts of the situation before you awoke, and that cushioned the shock.'

Kieran thought of himself, lying frozen and dead in a graveyard that was space, bodies drifting in orbit, circling slowly around each other as the years passed, in a macabre sarabande— A deep shiver shook him.

'Because all space-struck victims were in pressure-suits, dehydration was not the problem it could have been,' Paula was saying. 'But it's still a highly delicate process—'

He looked at her and interrupted roughly. 'What reasons?' And when she stared blankly, he added, 'You said there were good reasons why you picked me for revival. What reasons?'

Her face became tight and alert. 'You were the oldest victim, in point of date. That was one of the determining factors—'

'Look,' said Kieran. 'I'm not a child, nor yet a savage. You can drop the patronizing professional jargon and answer my question.'

Her voice became hard and brittle. 'You're new to this environment. You wouldn't understand if I told you.'

'Try me.'

'All right,' she answered. 'We need you, as a symbol, in a political struggle we're waging against the Sakae.'

'The Sakae?'

'I told you that you couldn't understand yet,' she answered impatiently, turning away. 'You can't expect me to fill you in on a whole world that's new to you, in five minutes.'

She started toward the door. 'Oh, no,' said Kieran. 'You're not going yet.'

He slid out of the bunk. He felt weak and shaky but resentment energized his flaccid muscles. He took a step toward her.

The lights suddenly went dim, and a bull-throated roar sounded from somewhere, an appalling sound of raw power. The slight tingling that Kieran had felt in the metal fabric around him abruptly became a vibration so deep and powerful that it dizzied him and he had to grab the stanchion of the bunk to keep from falling.

Alarm had flashed into the woman's face. Next moment, from some hidden speaker in the wall, a male voice yelled sharply,

'Overtaken—prepare for extreme evasion—'

'Get back into the bunk,' she told Kieran.

'What is it?'

'It may be,' she said with a certain faint viciousness, 'that you're about to die a second time.'