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he mumbled in a sleepy voice. He was surprised. He was pulled up with a sickening jolt. He had heard his own voice, reverberating as in an empty room.. .. The voice that followed was less of a shock than this disturbing mockery of survival.
    “Captain Mauris! Captain Mauris! Soon you will be too tired to be dead, too cold to be an illusion. For you are condemned to be reborn.”
    It was a woman’s voice, low, musical, drifting without urgency through the deep canyons of unbeing.
    Mauris listened, appalled. It was a voice he recognized—the voice of a woman he might have married, a familiar voice, belonging to one he had never known.
    “Who are you?” he called desperately, hearing the words echo on a wall of blackness.
    There was laughter tumbling through the emptiness of stars.
    “Mary Smith,” said the voice, “Betty Jones, and Pearl White. Marie-Antoinette, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy.”
    “I am mad!” cried Captain Mauris. “The stars are dark, and still there is something left to dream.”
    “You are unborn,” said the voice gently. “Have patience.”
    Captain Mauris tried to move and could not, for there was nothing to move, no location to be changed.
    “Who am I?” he shouted wildly.
    “Captain Mauris.”
    “There is no Captain Mauris,” he yelled savagely. “He is unborn, therefore he has never lived!”
    “You are learning,” came the answer, softly. “You are learning that it is necessary to wait.”
    “Who am I?” he demanded urgently.
    The laughter came like an invisible tide, sweeping him on its crest
    “Punchinello,” said the voice gaily, “Prometheus, Simple Simon, Alexander the Great.”
    “Who am I?” he called insistently.
    “You are no one. . . . Who knows? Perhaps you will become the first man. Perhaps you are waiting to be Adam.”
    “Then you are—”
    Again die dark surge of laughter.
    “I am the echo of a rib that has yet to sing.”
    “The rib is nowhere,” said Mauris, drowsy with the effort of words. “It belongs to me, and I am unborn. . . . Nowhere.”
    “Limbo,” whispered the voice.
    “Nowhere,” mumbled Mauris.
    “Limbo,” insisted the voice.
    “No . . . where,” repeated Mauris weakly, fighting the cold fatigue of stillness, the weight of unbeing.
    He could feel the laughter gathering, and knew that it would drown him. Desperation fought against the blind weariness sucking him into the heaving tide of sound. He tried to remember what it was like to pray.
    “Oh, God,” he whispered, “if I cannot die, let me become alive. Let there be light!”
    Once more the laughter struck. And the whirlpool opened.
    There were no stars yet, but the light came like a pallid finger, probing the interior of the stricken ship. Captain Mauris looked about him at dim shapes, and the sensation of wonder grew while fear plucked its familiar music from his taut nerves.
    There was something wrong—desperately wrong!
    Suddenly he understood. Everything had been reversed.
    The copper cylinder, which had been bolted to the deck on the port side of the main control panel, now lay on the starboard side, its smooth fiery surface crumpled like paper. Below it on the deck lay beads of still liquid copper rain.
    The starboard electrochron, with its numerals reversed, now lay on the port side, above the gaping hole where the lightometer had been.
    Captain Mauris turned his head to look at Kobler, but Phylo’s berth now lay there in place of the physicist’s. The  Captain knew without moving that his first officer was dead. Phylo stared at the deckhead, his features locked in a permanently vacant smile.
    Glancing around at the S.F.P. chief in Phylo’s old place, Captain Mauris saw that Kohler’s body was entirely relaxed. His eyes were closed, and in death he had the appearance of one who is concentrating very hard. Judging from his expression, thought Mauris, he had been trying in extremis to discover his error.
    The navigation deck of the Santa Maria was a