merely pleasantly warm.

He shook her, but she did not wake.

He stood up and regarded her thoughtfully. It was a disappointment. Her voice had given him hope of a companion, someone to talk things over with, to compare notes—someone who, if not possessing any more answers than himself, could at least serve as a sounding-board in the give-and-take of discussion that might make some sort of sense out of the queerness that permeated this place.

What he had instead was another burden to carry, for she was unable to care for herself and surely he could not leave her in this condition.

He slipped off the helmet absently and pressed the buttons that turned off the suit's cooling units, looking around the chamber. It was bare except for a litter of irrelevant human articles—much like the one in which he himself had first appeared, except that the articles were not Jodrell Bank's. A woven cane screen, some cooking utensils, a machine like a desk calculator, some books—he picked up one of the books and glanced at it. It was printed on coarse paper, and the text was in ideographs, Chinese, perhaps; he did not know Oriental languages.

McCray knew that the Jodrell Bank was not the only FTL vessel in this volume of space. The Betelgeuse run was a busy one, as FTL shipping lanes went. Almost daily departures from some point on Earth to one of the colonies, with equal traffic in the other direction.

Of course, if the time-lag in communication did not lie, he was no longer anywhere within that part of the sky; Betelgeuse was only a few hundred light-years from Sol, and subspace radio covered that distance in something like fifty minutes. But suppose the woman came from another ship; perhaps a Singapore or Tokyo vessel, on the same run. She might easily have been trapped as he was trapped. And if she were awake, he could find out from her what had happened, and thus learn something that might be of use.

Although it was hard to see what might be of use in these most unprecedented and unpleasant circumstances.

The drone from Jodrell Bank began again: "Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is Jodrell Bank responding—"

He turned the volume down but did not dare turn it off. He had lost track of time and couldn't guess when they would respond to his last message. He needed to hear that response when it came. Meanwhile, what about his 

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