Chapter 3

Stoner searched the drawers of the little bureau and found neat stacks of underwear, shirts, and slacks. No shoes, but several pairs of slipper socks.

Without even bothering to look at the size markings, he pulled on a pair of tan slacks and slipped an open-necked, short-sleeved buff-colored shirt over them. He did not bother with the socks. The floor felt comfortably warm.

Then he went to the window again and sat in the little armchair. The glass was all one piece; there was no way to open the window, and Stoner instinctively knew it would be too tough to shatter, even if he threw the chair at it.

Outside he saw lovely green landscaped grounds, dotted with gracefully swaying palm trees. In the distance, a high-

way busy with traffic, and beyond it a glistening white sand beach and a gentle surf rolling in from the blue ocean.

It did not look like Florida to him. California, possibly. Certainly not Kwajalein.

There were comparatively few automobiles on the highway, but those that Stoner saw looked only a little different from the cars he remembered. A bit lower and sleeker. They still ran on four wheels, from what he could see. He had not been asleep so long that totally new transportation systems had come into being. The trucks looked more changed, shaped more aerodynamically. And their cabs seemed longer, much more roomy than Stoner remembered them. He could not see any sooty fumes belching from them. Nor any diesel exhaust stacks. The trucks seemed to have their own lanes, separated from the automobile traffic by a raised divider.

It was quiet in his room. The highway sounds did not penetrate the window. The glistening bank of equipment that loomed around his shelf bed was barely humming. Stoner could hear himself breathing.

He leaned back in the chair and luxuriated in the pedestrian normality of it. Solid weight. The warmth of the sun shining through the window felt utterly wonderful on his face and bare arms. He watched the combers running up to the beach. The eternal sea, the heartbeat of the planet.

He closed his eyes. And for the briefest instant he saw a different scene, another world, alien yet familiar, vastly different from Earth and yet as intimately known as if he had been born there.

Stoner's eyes snapped open and focused on the enduring sea, unfailingly caressing the land; on the blue sky and stately white clouds adorning it. This is Earth, he told himself. The vision of an alien world faded and disappeared.

This is Earth, he repeated. I'm home. I'm safe now. Yet the memory of the flashback frightened him. He had never seen an alien landscape. He had never even set foot on Earth's own moon. But the vision in his mind had been as clear and solid as reality.

He shook his head and turned in the chair, away from the window. He saw that the curves of every monitoring screen had turned fiercely red and jagged. He took a deep breath and wijled his heart to slow back to normal. The sensor traces smoothed and returned to their usual soft green color.

A portion of the solid wall between the bureau and the bank of electronic equipment glowed briefly and vanished, creating a normal-sized doorway. Through it stepped a smiling man. Behind him the wall re-formed itself, as solid as it had been originally.

"Good morning," said the man. "I'm Gene Richards."

Stoner got to his feet and stretched out his hand. "You must be a psychiatrist, aren't you?"

Richards's smile remained fixed, but his eyes narrowed a trifle. "A good guess. An excellent guess."

He was a small man, slight, almost frail. Thick curly reddish-brown hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. Thin face with small bright probing eyes and strong white teeth that seemed a size too large for his narrow jaw. He looked almost rodentlike. He wore a casual, brightly flowered shirt over denim shorts. His feet were shod in leather sandals.

Stoner dropped back into his chair while the psychiatrist pulled one of the plastic chairs from the wall and straddled it backward, next to him.

"Where the hell are we, anyway?" Stoner asked. "Hawaii?"

Richards nodded. "The big island, just outside of Hilo."

"This isn't a hospital, is it? It feels more like some big laboratory complex.''

Again Richards bobbed his head up and down. "Right again. That's three in a row. Want to try for four?"

Stoner laughed softly. "I have no idea of how long I've been--suspended.''

"Eighteen years."

"Eighteen? . . ." Stoner felt the psychiatrist's eyes probing him. Past the man's suddenly intense face, he could see the row of display screens flickering their readout curves.

The silence stretched. Finally Richards asked, "How do you feel about returning from the dead?"

"I thought they'd bring me back a lot sooner than this."

"The alien spacecraft was recovered almost twelve years ago. You've been kept in cryonic suspension until the biotechnicians figured out how to thaw you without killing you."

"And the spacecraft?"

Richards's eyes shifted away slightly. "It's in orbit around the Earth."

"The alien himself . . ."

"He was quite dead. There wasn't a thing anybody could do about that."

Stoner leaned back in the chair and glanced out at the sea again.

"I'm the first man ever to be revived from cryonic suspension?" he asked.

"That's right. The scientists wanted to try some human guinea pigs, but the government wouldn't allow it."

"And the doorway you came in through, you learned that trick from the spacecraft.''

Richards nodded again. "That . . . trick--it's revolutionizing everything."

"The ability to transform solid matter into pure energy and then back again," Stoner said.

"How would you . . ." Richards stopped himself. "Oh, sure. Of course. You're a physicist yourself, aren't you?"

"Sort of. I was an astrophysicist."

"So you know about things like that," the psychiatrist assured himself.

Stoner said nothing. He searched his mind for the knowledge he had just given words to. The alien's spacecraft had opened itself to him in the same way: a portion of the solid metal hull disappearing to form a hatchway. But he had never thought about the technique for doing it until the words had formed themselves in his mouth.

"How much do you remember?" Richards asked. "Can you recall how you got to the alien spacecraft?"

It was Stoner's turn to nod. "The last thing I remember is turning off the heater in my suit. It was damned cold. I must have blacked out then."

"You remember Kwajalein and the project to contact the spacecraft? The people you worked with?"

"Markov. Jo Camerata. McDermott and Tuttle and all the rest, sure. And Federenko, the cosmonaut."

Richards touched the corner of his mustache with the tip of a finger. "When you got to the alien's spacecraft, you deliberately decided to remain there, instead of returning to Earth." It was a statement of fact, not a question.

"That's right," said Stoner.

"Why?"

Stoner smiled at him. "You want to know why I chose death over life, is that it?"

"That's it," Richards admitted.

"But I'm alive," Stoner said softly. "I didn't die."

"You had no way of knowing that. . . ."

"I had faith in the people I worked with. I knew they wouldn't leave me up there. They'd bring me back and revive me."

Richards looked totally unconvinced. But he forced a smile across his face. "We'll talk about that some more, later on."

"I'm sure we will."

"Is there anything I can do for you?" Richards asked. "Anything you want to know, anyone you want to see?"

Stoner thought a moment. "My kids--they must be grown adults by now."

The psychiatrist glanced up toward the ceiling, like a man trying to remember facts he had learned by rote. "Your son, Douglas, is an executive with a restaurant chain in the Los Angeles area. He's thirty-three, married, and has two children, both boys."

Thirty-three, Stoner thought. Christ, I've missed half his life.

"Your daughter, Eleanor," Richards went on, "will be thirty in a few weeks. She's married to a Peace Enforcer named Thompson; they make their home in Christchurch, New Zealand. They have two children, also. A girl and a boy."

"I'm a grandfather."

"Four times over." Richards smiled.

A grandfather, but a lousy father, Stoner told himself.

Richards's smile faded. Slowly, he said, "Your ex-wife died several years ago. A highway accident."

The pain surprised Stoner. He had expected to feel nothing. The open wound that their divorce had ripped out of his soul had been numbed long ago, covered with emotional scar tissue as thick as a spacecraft's heat shield. Or so Stoner had thought. Yet the news of Doris's death cut right through and stabbed deep into his flesh.

"Are you all right?" Richards asked.

Stoner turned away from his inquisitive face and looked through the window, out at the sun-sparkling sea.

"It's a lot to take in, all at once," he replied to the psychiatrist.

"Yes," Richards said. "We'll take it as slow as you like."

Stoner turned back toward him. The man was trying to keep his emotions to himself, but Stoner could see past his eyes, past the slightly quizzical smile that was supposed to be reassuring. I'm a laboratory specimen to him; an intriguing patient, the subject of a paper he'll deliver at an international conference of psychiatrists.

He looked deeper and realized that there was more to it. Richards truly wanted to help Stoner. The desire to be helpful was real, even if it was underlain by the desire to further his own career. And even deeper than that, buried so deeply that Richards himself barely knew of its existence, was the drive to learn, to know, to understand. Stoner smiled at the psychiatrist. He recognized that drive, that urgent passion. He himself had been a slave to it in his earlier life.

Richards misinterpreted his smile. "You feel better?"

"Yes," Stoner said. "I feel better."

The psychiatrist got to his feet. "I think that's enough information for you to digest for the time being."

"How long will I be here?"

Richards shrugged. "They'll want to run tests. . . ."

Stoner pulled himself up from his chair. He towered over the psychiatrist. "How long?"

"I really don't know."

"Days? Weeks? Months?"

Richards put on his brightest smile. "I truly can't say. Weeks, at least. Probably a couple of months." He started for the spot on the wall where the portal had opened.

Stoner asked, "Can I at least get out of this room and walk around the place?"

"Oh, sure," Richards said over his shoulder. "In a day or so."

"They're going to guard me pretty closely, aren't they?"

The wall glowed and the portal in it opened. "You're a very important person," Richards said. "The first man to be revived after cryonic suspension. You'll be famous."

Glancing around the bare room, Stoner asked, "Can you get me something to read? I've got eighteen years of news to catch up on."

The psychiatrist hesitated a moment. "Okay," he said. "I'll see that you get some reading material. But probably

you ought to go slowly--there's a certain amount of cultural shock that you're going to have to deal with."

"Cultural shock?"

"The world's changed a lot in the past eighteen years."

"That's what I want to find out about."

"In due time. For the first few days, I think we ought to confine your reading to entertainment, rather than current events."

A sudden question popped into Stoner's mind. "Markov," he blurted. "Kirill Markov, the Russian linguist I worked with. How is he?"

Richards made a small shrug. "As far as I know, he's fine. Living in Moscow again. I believe he sent a message asking about you recently."

He stepped through and the wall became solid again. Stoner stood in the middle of the room, thinking that the first use of the alien's technology had been to make a jail cell for him.