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 table.

The walls, at least, looked familiar. They seemed to be paneled in some fine wood. He walked over and touched it.

And knew immediately that, no matter what it looked like, it wasn't wood. The illusion was there to the eye, but no wood ever had such a hard, smooth, glasslike surface as this. He jerked his fingertips away.

He recognized, then, the emotion that had made him 

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