prospect of doing the dead man's float forever."

"I don't remember it being any special time. It was like a dream, sir, you know."

"I don't know, but I'm trying to find out." Von Ulrich sighed and looked through the spaceport at blackness. "Out here I sometimes find myself wondering what normalcy really is. Things sometimes veer toward the dangerously relativistic." He sat there in the pure one hundred percent silence of the basketball while it accumulated. "There's one thing we've always insisted no human being could tolerate, Barton. Isolation. Sullivan said that a single minute of complete isolation would kill a human being. And you've been in a dead man's float for almost twenty-two years."

"Twenty-two years, sir?"

"Doesn't mean a thing to you does it?"

"Well, sir, it doesn't seem to have had any time in it. I was just here."

There was another time, like all the other times, except that Von Ulrich seemed much older, his hair thinner and now all of it gray. There seemed to be something tired about him, except for the brightness coming from behind his intense questioning eyes.

Suddenly he asked, "Barton, what time is it?"

Barton glanced at the chrono. "Quarter of four, sir."

"Keep looking."

After a while Barton said, "Still quarter of four."

"That chrono hasn't been working for three years. I stopped it three years ago. You haven't even noticed it, have you?"

"I guess not, sir."

"Take a long look out there, Barton. Nothing to see but blackness. No feeling of distance. Imagine your mind going out there, exploring, trying to fit in somewhere. You look out there, you project your thoughts out there, nothing comes back. So what time is it? Where are you in all this? There was nothing out here until you came along, not even any meaningful kind of time out here. But there has to be some feeling of time, Barton!"

Barton felt a tinge of uneasiness. He looked out. It looked cold.

"What time is it, Barton?"

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