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A novella from the Legends Canon.

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If you enjoy this tale, I hope you'll read some of my other stories. This takes place between Brick Bronze and Sword and Shield. Both are recommended but this can be read on its own. The Pokedex Holder Pearl is abducted and finds himself on a journey through space.

Note: Pearl is in his late twenties at this point in the timeline.

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Part I:

Out of the Leaguer of the Moon

Location: Sandgem Town

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To the Ocean now I fly,

And those happy climes that ly

Where day never shuts his eye,

Up in the broad fields of the sky

-John Milton

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The last drops of the shower had barely ceased falling when Pearl stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut tree into the middle of the road. A violent yellow sunset was pouring through a rift in the clouds westward, but straight ahead over the hills the sky was the color of dark slate. Every tree and blade of grass was dripping, and the road shone like a river.

Pearl wasted no time on the landscape but set out at once with the determined stride of a good walker who has lately realized that he will have to walk farther than he intended. That was his situation. If he had chosen to look back, which he did not, he could have seen the crests of the house of the Belle Hotel atop the eastern hills, and, seeing it, might have uttered a malediction on the inhospitable little hotels which, though obviously empty, had refused him a bed. Refused him, even though he showed him his Pokedex!

The town had changed hands since he last went for a walking tour in these parts. Usually he was abroad giving his routines in other regions. Only the mansion fo hous Berlitz would probably receive him at this hour. Sebastian, the kindly old butler on whom he had reckoned had recently died and been replaced by someone whom Platinum referred to as 'the lady,' and the lady was apparently a Kantoian innkeeper of that orthodox school who regarded guests as a nuisance. His only chance now was the mansion, on the far side of the hills, and a good six miles away. At least he would be received like family there.

Eventually after walking doggedly for some time he became tired. This did not deter him. Sending out a Tauros he mounted and rode away atop it, the Pokemon's tail flicking, its eyes flashing, and hooves pounding on the masonry. He had rode thus for a matter of two miles when he became aware of a light ahead. He was close under the hills by now and it was nearly dark, so that he still cherished hopes of arriving at the manor before dark until he was quite close to the real origin of the light; which proved to be a very small cottage of ugly brick.. A woman darted out of the open doorway as he approached it and almost collided with him. Tauros reared up and gave a roar.

"Whoa there, sir!" she cried. "I thought you were my Jerry."

"No trouble," said Pearl. "I should have paid more attention. Do you think that the Berlitz Manor is open right now?"

"No, sir," she said. "Not unless they know you. You won't any place that can lodge you closer than Oreburgh." She spoke in a humbly fretful voice as if her mind were intent on something else.

Ransom thanked the woman as well as he could and bade her goodbye, after ascertaining that he would find manor on his left in about five minutes. Stiffness had grown upon him while he was sitting still, and he painfully rose again till he was riding at a trot again.

Something like drowsiness had already descended upon him when he found himself startled into vigilance. A peculiar noise was going on in the dark, in the ditch before the manor's walls; a scuffling, irregular noise, vaguely reminiscent of a football scrum. He rose in his saddle. The noise was unmistakable by now. People in boots were fighting or wrestling or playing some game. They were shouting too. He could not make out the words but he heard the monosyllabic barking ejaculations of men who are angry and out of breath. The last thing Pearl wanted was an adventure, but a conviction that he ought to investigate the matter was already growing upon him when a much louder cry rang out in which he could distinguish the words, "Let me go. Let me go," and then, a second later, "I'm not going in there. Let me go home."

Throwing off his pack and dismounting, Pearl sprang down muddy grass, and ran round to the ditch as quickly as his stiff and footsore condition allowed him. He produced a Floatzel and Chatot along with the Tauros. The ruts and pools of the muddy path led him to what seemed to be a yard, but a yard surrounded with an a usual number of outhouses. He had a momentary vision of a tall chimney, a low door filled with red firelight, and a huge round shape that rose black against the stars, which he took for the dome of a small observatory: then all this was blotted out of his mind by the figures of three men who were struggling together so close to him that he almost cannoned into them. From the very first Pearl felt no doubt that the central figure, whom the two others seemed to be detaining in spite of his struggles, was the old woman's Jerry. He would like to have thundered out, "What are you doing to that boy?" but the words that actually came, in rather an unimpressive voice, were, "Here! I say!..."

The three combatants fell suddenly apart, the boy blubbering. "May I ask," said the thicker and taller of the two men, "who the hell you may be and what you are doing here?" His voice had all the qualities that Pearl's had so regrettably lacked.

"I'm on a walking tour," said Pearl. "I was going to rest here..."

"To hell with your walking tour," said the man. "How did you get onto the premises?"

"I'm a Pokedex Holder," Pearl said, feeling a little ill-temper come to his assistance. "I don't know what you're doing to that boy, but I'll..."

"We ought to have a Pokemon in this place," said the thick man to his companion, ignoring Pearl. "This new fellow's got plenty of them."

"You mean we should have a Pokemon if you hadn't insisted on using a human for an experiment," said the man who had not yet spoken. He was nearly as tall as the other, but slender, and apparently the younger of the two, and his voice sounded vaguely familiar to Pearl.

The latter made a fresh beginning. "Look here," he said, "I don't know what you are doing to that boy, but it's long after hours and it is high time you sent him home. I haven't the least wish to interfere in your private affairs, but..."

"Who are you?" bawled the thick man.

"I'm Pearl of Sinnoh, Pokedex Holder, if that is what you mean."

"By Arceus!" said the slender man, "not the famous Pearl, of the comedy duo Diamond and Pearl? Defeater of Team Galatic?"

"That was decades ago," said Pearl.

"Touching, isn't it?" said the thick man. "The far-flung line even in the wilds! This is where we get a lump in our throats and remember Sunday evening church. You don't know me, perhaps? I'm Rhodes of Galar." Rhodes indicated his smaller and loud-voiced companion. "This is Volkner," he added. "You know. The great physicist, once a Gym Leader. Has Moon's brain on toast and drinks a pint of Yanase Berlitz's blood for breakfast."

"I know nothing about it," said Volkner, who was still holding the unfortunate Jerry by the collar. "And if you expect me to say that I am pleased to see this person who has just broken into our research station, you will be disappointed. I don't care a bit what Pokedex he has at nor what unscientific foolery he is at present wasting money that ought to go to research. I want to know what he's doing here: and after that I want to see the last of him."

"Don't be an ass, Volkner," said Rhodes in a more serious voice. "His dropping in is delightfully apropos. You mustn't mind Volkner's little way, Pearl. Conceals a generous heart beneath a grim exterior, you know. He's been sour ever since the Emperor Bronze Tercano sacked him."

"What about the boy?" Pearl asked.

Rhodes drew Pearl aside. "He's good," he said in a low voice. "Works like a beaver as a rule but gets these fits. We are only trying to get him into the house and keep him quiet for an hour or so till he's normal again. Can't let him go home in his present state. All done with kindness. You can take him home yourself presently if you like and come back and sleep here."

"Oh, alright," said Pearl. "But how did you get a house by the manor?" Pearl was very much perplexed. There was something about the whole scene suspicious enough and disagreeable enough to convince him that he had blundered on something criminal, while on the other hand he had all the deep, irrational conviction of his age and class that such things could never cross the path of an ordinary person except in fiction and could least of all be associated with young men and comedians. Even if they had been ill-treating the boy, Pearl thought it would be easy enough to get him by force, unless they had hidden Pokemon.

"We got a permit," said Rhodes. "Now, we're industrial all the way, but we couldn't find a better site for it. Since Lady Platinum hasn't been here in months the landlady told us we could set up shop."

While Rhodes was speaking something odd began to happen to Pearl. At first it merely seemed to him that Rhode's words were no longer making sense. He appeared to be saying that he was industrial all down both sides but could never get an experiment to fit him anywhere. Then he realized that Rhodes was not so much unintelligible as inaudible, which was not surprising, since he was now so far away, about a mile away, though perfectly clear like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. From that bright distance where he stood he was gazing at Pearl with a new expression on his face. The gaze became disconcerting. Pearl tried to move but found that he had lost all power over his own body. He felt quite comfortable, but it was as if his legs and arms had been bandaged to the ground and his head gripped in a vice; a beautifully padded (it seemed), but quite immovable, vice. He did not feel afraid, though he knew that he ought to be afraid and soon would be. Then, very gradually, the night sky faded from his sight.

...

Pearl could never be sure whether what followed had any bearing on the events recorded in this tale or whether it was merely an irresponsible dream. It seemed to him that he and Volkner and Rhodes were all standing in a little garden surrounded by a wall. The garden was bright and sunlit, but over the top of the wall you could see nothing but darkness. They were trying to climb over the wall and Volkner asked them to give him a hoist up. Pearl kept on telling him not to go over the wall because it was so dark on the other side, but Volkner insisted, and all three of them set about doing so. Pearl was the last.

He got astride on the top of the wall, sitting on his coat because of the broken bottles. The other two had already dropped down on the outside into the darkness, but before he followed them a door in the wall which none of them had noticed was opened from without and the queerest people he had ever seen came into the garden bringing Volkner and Rhodes back with them. They left them in the garden and retired into the darkness themselves, locking the door behind them. Pearl found it impossible to get down from the wall. He remained sitting there, not frightened but rather uncomfortable because his right leg, which was on the outside, felt so dark and his left leg felt so light. "My leg will drop off if it gets much darker," he said.

He began to realize that his leg was not so much dark as cold and stiff; because he had been resting the other on it for so long: and also that he was in an armchair in a lighted room. A conversation was going on near him and had, he now realized, being going on for some time. His head was comparatively clear. He realized that he had been drugged or hypnotized, or both, and he felt that some control over his own body was returning to him though he was still very weak. He listened intently without trying to move.

"I'm getting a little tired of this, Volkner," Rhodes was saying, "and especially as it's my money that is being risked. I tell you he'll do quite as well as the boy, and in some ways better. Only, he'll be coming around very soon now and we must get him on board at once. We ought to have done it an hour ago."

"But the boy was ideal," sulked Volkner. "The Emperor will be on our trail once he learns that Pearl is missing. We do not want to be captured by Bronze Tercano."

"I dare say. But if we're quick enough he won't feel any interest in prosecuting us, you understand. Ths busy-body poked his nose in the whole thing and he ought to face the consequences."

'Well, I confess I don't like it. He is, after all, human. The boy was really almost a preparation. Still, he's only an individual, and probably a quite useless one. We're risking our own lives, too. In a great cause..."

"For the Lord's sake. don't start all that stuff now. We haven't got time."

"I dare say," replied Volkner, "he would consent if he could be made to understand."

"Take his feet and I'll take his head," said Rhodes.

"If you really think he's coming around," said Volkner, "you'd better have Espeon blast him again. We can't start till we get the time right. It wouldn't be pleasant to have him struggling in there for three hours or so. It would be better if he didn't wake up till we were underway."

"True enough. Just keep an eye on him while I run upstairs and get Espeon."

Rhodes left the room. Pearl saw through his half-closed eyes that Volkner was standing over him. He had no means of foretelling how his own body would respond, if it responded at all, to a sudden attempt at movement, but he saw at once that he must take his chance. Almost before Rhodes had closed the door he flung himself with all his force at Volkner's feet. The scientist fell forward across the chair, and Pearl, flinging him off with an agonizing effort, rose and dashed out into the hall. He was very weak and fell as he entered it but terror was behind him and in a couple of seconds he had found the hall door and was working desperately to master the bolts. Darkness and his trembling hands were against him. Before he had drawn one bolt, booted feet were clattering over the carpetless floor behind him. He was gripped by the shoulders and the knees. Kicking, writhing, dripping with sweat, and bellowing as loud as he could in the faint hope of rescue, he prolonged the struggle with a violence of which he would have believed himself incapable. For one glorious moment the door was open, the fresh night air was in his face, he saw the reassuring stars and even his Poke Balls lying strewn around on the porch. Then a heavy blow fell on his head. Consciousness faded, and the last thing of which he was aware was the grip of strong hands pulling him back into the dark passage, and the sound of a closing door.

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When Pearl came to his senses he seemed to be in bed in a dark room. He had a pretty severe headache, and this, combined with a general lassitude, discouraged him at first from attempting to rise or to take stock of his surroundings. He noticed, drawing his hand across his forehead, that he was sweating freely, and this directed his attention to the fact that the room (if it was a room) was remarkably warm. Moving his arms to fling off the bedclothes, he touched a wall at the right side of the bed: it was not only warm, but hot.

He moved his left hand to and fro in the emptiness on the other side and noticed that there the air was cooler: apparently the heat was coming from the wall. He felt his face and found a bruise over the left eye. This recalled to his mind the struggle with Volkner and Rhodes, and he instantly concluded that they had put him in a cell behind a furnae. At the same time he looked up and recognized the source of the dim light in which, without noticing it, he had all along been able to see the movements of his own hands. There was some kind of skylight immediately over his head, a square of night sky filled with stars.

It seemed to Pearl that he had never looked out on such a frosty night. Pulsing with brightness as with some unbearable pain or pleasure, clustered in pathless and countless multitudes, dreamlike in clarity, blazing in perfect blackness, the stars seized all his attention, troubled him, excited him, and drew him up to a sitting position. At the same time they quickened the throb of his headache, and this reminded him that he had been psychically drugged He was just formulating to himself the theory that the stuff Espeon had used on him might have some effect on the pupil and that this would explain the unnatural splendor and fullness of the sky, When a disturbance of silver light, almost a pale and miniature sunrise, at one corner of the skylight, drew his eyes upward again.

Some minutes later the orb of the full moon was pushing its way into the field of vision. Pearl sat still and watched. He had never seen such a moon, so white, so blinding and so large. "Like a great football just outside the glass," he thought, and then, a moment later; "No, it's bigger than that." By this time he was quite certain that something was seriously wrong with his eyes: no moon could possibly be the size of the thing he was seeing.

The light of the huge moon, if it was a moon, had by now illuminated his surroundings almost as clearly as if it were day. It was a very strange room. The floor was so small that the bed and a table beside it occupied the whole width of it: the ceiling seemed to be nearly twice as wide and the walls sloped outward as they rose, so that Pearl had the impression of lying at the bottom of a deep and narrow wheelbarrow. This confirmed his belief that his sight was either temporarily or permanently injured. In other respects, however, he was recovering rapidly and even beginning to feel an unnatural lightness of heart and a not disagreeable excitement.

The heat was still oppressive, and he stripped off everything but his shirt and jeans before rising to explore. His rising was disastrous and raised graver apprehensions in his mind about the effects of being drugged. Although he had been conscious of no unusual muscular effort, he found himself leaping from the bed with an energy that brought his head into sharp contact with the skylight and flung him down again in a heap on the floor. He found himself on the other side against the wall, the wall that ought to have sloped outwards like the side of a wheelbarrow, according to his previous reconnaissance. But it didn't. He felt it and looked at it; it was unmistakably at right angles to the floor. More cautiously this time, he rose again to his feet.

He felt an extraordinary lightness of body: it was, with difficulty, that he kept his feet on the floor. For the first time a suspicion that he might be dead and already in the ghost-life crossed his mind. He was trembling, but a hundred mental habits forbade him to consider this possibility. Instead, he explored his prison. The result was beyond doubt: all the walls looked as if they sloped outwards so as to make the room wider at the ceiling than it was at the floor, but each wall as you stood beside it turned out to be perfectly perpendicular, not only to sight but to touch also if one stooped down and examined with one's fingers the angle between it and the floor.

The same examination revealed two other curious facts. The room was walled and floored with metal, and was in a state of continuous faint vibration, a silent vibration with a strangely lifelike and unmechanical quality about it. But if the vibration was silent, there was plenty of noise going on a series of musical raps or percussions at quite irregular intervals which seemed to come from the ceiling. It was as if the metal chamber in which he found himself was being bombarded with small, tinkling missiles. They made a vague hissing noise as well. Pearl was by now thoroughly frightened. not with the prosaic fright that a man suffers in a war, but with a heady, bounding kind of fear that was hardly distinguishable from his general excitement: he was poised on a sort of emotional watershed from which, he felt, he might at any moment pass either into delirious terror or into an ecstasy of joy.

He knew now that he was not in a submarine: and the infinitesimal quivering of the metal did not suggest the motion of any wheeled vehicle. A ship, then, he supposed, or some kind of airship...but there was an oddity in all his sensations for which neither supposition accounted. He was not in space; he would be floating around, unless the ship was rotating. Yet in that case the rotation would push him against the walls of the ship and not the floor, and he would not be able to see the moon-thing for long. Puzzled, he sat down again on the bed, and stared at the portentous white orb.

An airship, some kind of flying machine...but why did the moon look so big? It was larger than he had thought at first. No moon could really be that size, and he realized now that he had known this from the first but had repressed the knowledge through terror. At the same moment a thought came into his head which stopped his breath: there could be no full moon at all that night. He remembered distinctly that he had walked from Veilstone on a moonless night. Even if the thin crescent of a new moon had escaped his notice, it could, not have grown to this in a few hours. It could not have grown to this at all, this megalomaniac disc, far larger than the football he had at first compared it to, larger than a child's hoop, filling almost half the sky. And where was the old "man in the moon", the familiar face that had looked down on all the generations of Men and Pokemon? The thing wasn't the Moon at all; he felt his hair move on his scalp.

At that moment the sound of an opening door made him turn his head. An oblong of dazzling light appeared behind him. and instantly vanished as the door closed again, having admitted the slender form of a man whom Pearl recognized as Volkner. No, reproach, no demand for an explanation, rose to Pearl's lips or even to his mind; not with that monstrous orb above them.

The mere presence of a human being, with its offer of at least some companionship, broke down the tension in which his nerves had long been resisting a bottomless dismay. He found, when he spoke, that he was sobbing.

"Volker! Volkner!" he gasped. "What is it? It's not the Moon, not that size. It can't be, can it?"

"No," said Volkner. "It's the Earth."

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Pearl's legs failed him, and he must have sunk back upon the bed, but he only became aware of this many minutes later. At the moment he was unconscious of everything except his fear. He did not even know what he was afraid of, the fear itself possessed his whole mind, a formless, infinite misgiving. He did not lose consciousness, though he greatly wished that he might do so. Any change, death or sleep, or, best of all, a waking which should show all this for a dream, would have been inexpressibly welcome. None came. Instead, the lifelong self-control of social man, the virtues which are half hypocrisy or the hypocrisy which is half a virtue, came back to him and soon he found himself answering Volkner in a voice not shamefully tremulous.

"Do you mean that?" he said.

"Certainly."

"Then where are we?"

"Standing out from earth at a distance of about eighty-thousand miles."

"So we're in space," said Pearl in a voice like a squeak.

Volkner nodded.

"But where's the gravity coming from? And what on earth have you kidnapped me for? What have you done to my Pokemon?"

"Your Pokemon are lying in their Poke Balls at the front porch of our research shack," said Volkner. "As for the gravity, you would never understand how it works, not a thousand years. Just know that it has something to do with a mix of pure magic and hard science. I don't feel disposed to give you an answer about what we are going to actually do with you."

Volkner handed Pearl a small round object. "This is a telescope. Take a look at Earth. You need some perspective on things before I tell you why you ought to be thankful."

Pearl leaned forward with his elbows on the bed looked. He saw perfect blackness and, floating in the center of it, seemingly an arm's length away, a bright disk about the size of a quarter held up to his eyes. Most of its surface was featureless, shining blue flecked with silver; towards the bottom markings appeared, and below them a white cap, just as he had seen the polar caps in astronomical photographs of Mars. As his eyes took in the markings better, he recognized that they were Sinnoh, Kanto, and a piece of Johto and Kalos. They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture and this somehow shocked him. But it was Earth he was seeing, even, perhaps, Berlitz Manor, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not imagining it. It was all there in that little disk: Jubilife, Sinnoh, his friends, all Pokemon. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his Poke Balls were still lying on the porch of a house near the manor.

"That is Earth," he said dully. It was the bleakest moment of his travels.

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"As to why we are here," said Volkner, "we are on our way to Handrama..."

"You mean a star called Handrama? Can you go faster than light?"

"No. At the speed we are going it would take years to get out of the Solar System. The planet Handrama is much nearer than that: we shall make it in about three light days."

"I'm going to be here for less than a week?" said Pearl.

"No, you will be here sixty days. We can't go any after than light. In fact we can't even get to a sizable percentage of it."

"But there isn't a planet called Handrama."

"I am giving it its real name, not the name invented by terrestrial astronomers," said Volkner.

"But surely this is nonsense," said Pearl. "How the hell did you find out its real name, as you call it?"

"From the inhabitants."

It took Pearl some time to digest this statement. "Do you mean to tell me you claim to have been to this star before, or this planet, or whatever it is?"

"Yes."

"You can't really ask me to believe that," said Pearl. "Damn it all, it's not an everyday thing! Why has no one heard of it? Why has it not been in all the news stations?"

"Because we are not idiot enough to tell everyone," said Volkner gruffly.

After a few moments silence Pearl began again. "Which planet is it in our terminology?" he asked.

"Europa. You have doubtless heard of it, and the underground oceans. That's where the life is. I did say it was inhabited, so think up whatever bogeys scare you the most. Give them big eyes for seeing in the underwater deeps and tentacles for grasping legs."

The uneasiness which this produced in Pearl rapidly merged in an anger that he had almost lost sight of amidst the conflicting emotions that beset him. "And what has all this to do with me?" he broke out. "You have assaulted me, psychically drugged me, and are apparently carrying me off as a prisoner in this infernal spaceship. What have I done to you? What do you say for yourself?"

"That I don't know," said Volkner. "It was no idea of ours. We are only obeying orders."

"Whose?"

There was another pause. "Come," said Volkner. "We have used enough oxygen talking. I am glad you raised the point of your anger, and I advise you to remember the grand thing you are doing. In the meantime, if you will follow me into the next room, we will have breakfast. Be careful how you get up: your weight here is hardly appreciable compared with your weight on Earth."

...

Pearl rose and his captor opened the door. Instantly the room was flooded with a dazzling golden light which completely eclipsed the pale earthlight behind him.

"I will give you darkened glasses in a moment," said Volkner as he preceded him into the chamber whence the radiance was pouring. It seemed to Pearl that Volkner went up a hill towards the doorway and disappeared suddenly downwards when he had passed it. When he followed, which he did with caution, he had the curious impression that he was walking up to the edge of a precipice: the new room beyond the doorway seemed to be built on its side so that its farther wall lay almost in the same plane as the floor of the room he was leaving. When, however, he ventured to put forward his foot, he found that the floor continued flush and as he entered the second room the walls suddenly righted themselves and the rounded ceiling was over his head. Looking back, he perceived that the bedroom in its turn was now heeling over, its roof a wall and one of its walls a roof.

"You will soon get used to it," said Volkner, following his gaze. "The ship is roughly toroidal, and now that we are outside the gravitational field of the Earth "down" means, and feels, towards the center of our own little metal world. This, of course, was foreseen and we built her accordingly. The core of the ship is a gravitationally attractive center attached to the outer ring with metal struts that we keep our stores inside, and the top of those struts is a part of the habitable ring that you perceive as the floor. The cabins are arranged all around this, their walls supporting an outer surface which from our point of view is the roof. As the center is always "down", the piece of floor you are standing on always feels flat or horizontal and the wall you are standing against always seems vertical. On the other hand, the globe of the floor is so small that you can always see over the edge of it, over what would be the horizon if you were a flea, and then you see the floor and walls of the next cabin in a different plane. It is just the same; on Earth, of course, only we are not big enough to see it."

After this explanation he made arrangements in his precise, ungracious way for the comfort of his guest or prisoner. Pearl, at his advice, removed all his ordinary clothes and substituted a single-piece suit with lead weights in them to reduce, as far as possible, the unmanageable lightness of his body. The gravitational core was not strong enough to accurately simulate earthlike gravity. He also assumed tinted glasses, and soon found himself seated opposite Rhodes at a small table laid for breakfast. He was both hungry and thirsty and eagerly attacked the meal which consisted of tinned meat, biscuit, butter and coffee.

But all these actions he had performed mechanically. Stripping, eating and drinking passed almost unnoticed, and all he ever remembered of his first meal in the spaceship was the tyranny of heat and light. Both were present in a degree which would have been intolerable on Earth, but each had a new quality. The light was paler than any light of comparable intensity that he had ever seen; it was not pure white but the palest of all imaginable golds, and it cast shadows as sharp as a floodlight. The heat, utterly free from moisture, seemed to knead and stroke the skin like a gigantic masseur: it produced no tendency to drowsiness: rather, intense alacrity. His headache was gone: he felt vigilant, courageous and magnanimous as he had seldom felt on Earth. Gradually he dared to raise his eyes to the skylight. Steel shutters were drawn across all but a chink of the glass, and that chink was covered with blinds of some heavy and dark material; but still it was too bright to look at.

"I always thought space was dark and cold," he marked vaguely.

"Have you forgotten the sun?" said Volkner contemptuously.

Pearl went on eating for some time. Then he began, "It's like this in the early morning," and stopped, warned by the expression on Volkner's face. Awe fell upon him: there were no mornings here, no evenings, and no night, nothing but the changeless noon which had filled for centuries beyond history so many billions of cubic miles.

"Hold on," said Pearl, "I've heard stories of astronauts, and it was never this bright in space, you know, even in the sun. What is going on here?"

"Don't talk," said Volkner, raising up his hand. "We have discussed all that is necessary. The ship does not carry oxygen enough for any unnecessary exertion; not even for talking."

"Not enough oxygen?" said Pearl despite himself. "You don't even have extra canisters? This spaceship isn't very orthodox. I'd say it's inferior."

Volkner shushed him. Shortly afterwards he rose, without inviting the others to follow him, and left the room by one of the many doors which Pearl had not yet seen opened. Pearl tried to look at the blinding brightness emitting from the skylight again, said: "I'm in space," and then collapsed onto the table. Rhodes signed and cleaned up the strewn food.