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with a shout that drowned Rimini's words were the doctor's own fear of death which now struck Conner as a sickening, small, petty thing, and the doctor's fear of what Conner had become—can he read my mind, does he know that I . . . and the stream trailed off into a wilderness of the small obscenities which were at least part of the reason for his will to suicide, not the doctor's alone; too many were like him, so that Conner had found even the hospital, with its animal shudderings of minds and bodies in agony, more endurable than the outside with men preoccupied with their own hungers and lusts and greed. He had crawled into a hole in the hospital and pulled the hole in after him, emerging only to try dying as a change, and never succeeding.
    When Rimini had babbled himself away again, Conner lay looking at the ceiling. He felt like laughing. Not with amusement, though.
    They spoke of the will to live he had demonstrated after the accident. It had been a bad one, one of the big ships exploding in space, and the personnel hardly having time to crowd into lifeboats; four of them, instead, had made it into the experimental plastic emergency bubblesuits and had fallen into space in those.
    The others had never been recovered. Conner wondered sometimes what had happened to them: had the life-support system mercifully failed, so that they died quickly and sane? Had they gone mad and raved mindlessly down to death? Were they still drifting out there in the endless night? He quailed from the thought. His own hell was bad enough.
    The bubbles had been meant for protection for minutes, until pickup could be made by lifeboat, not for days or weeks. The life-support system was fail-safe, and hadn't failed. It had worked too well. Conner, breathing endlessly recycled oxygen, fed by intravenous dribbles of nutrient, had lived. And lived. Lived for days, weeks, months, spinning endlessly in free-fall in an invisible bubblefield, with nothing else between himself and the trillions upon trillions of stars.
    He had no measure of time. He had no means of knowing up from down, no means of orientation. He had nothing to look at but distant flaming points of stars that spun and wheeled round him in his tiny days of rotation on his own center.
    Five hours in a sensory deprivation tank, back in the prehistory of psychology, had sent men insane.
    Conner spent the first ten days or so—he later figured—in a desperate hope, clinging to sanity and the hope of rescue.
    Then, in his own endlessly prisoning universe, he went insane. Contemplating his own center, he spun like a god and emerged knowing there was no protection or death, even in madness. There was not even hunger upon which to orient himself.
    There was only his own mind, and the universe. And so he began spinning, ranging through the universe, his body left behind, his mind wholly free. He visited a thousand, thousand worlds, touched a thousand, thousand minds, never knowing dream from reality.
    They picked him up—chance, the merest fluke—-some four months after the crash. And Conner was insane, but in a strange way. His brain, left alone with itself too long, had learned to reach beyond, and now he was something he could not name, or others guess. Fixed firmly in a body chained to hunger, thirst, gravity and stress, he could not leave himself behind again; nor could he endure the life he had resigned himself to lose.
    "Mr. Conner," a voice interrupted his thoughts, "you have a visitor."
    He heard the man, incurious, wishing he would go away until he heard the name of Darkover, and then he didn't believe it.
    He accepted only to escape any further contact with the hospital whose shelter had become a blind alley, a mousetrap for his soul. And because, on a world of telepaths, there might be some who could help him to handle this thing, to turn off the nightmare he had become without desiring it and without knowing why.
    And, perhaps, a little, to find the voice in his dream . .