He was lying on a hard, smooth surface and a roof of metal came down close above his head. And beside him was a thing that purred and rumbled. One arm was flung across the purring thing and somehow he knew that he had slept with the thing clasped in his arms, with his body pressed against it, as a child might sleep with a beloved Teddy bear.
There was no sense of time and no sense of place and no sense of any life before. As if he had sprung full-limbed by magic into life and intelligence and knowing.
He lay still and his eyes became accustomed to the dark and he saw the open door and the dark stain, now dry, that led across the threshold into the room beyond. Something had dragged itself there, from the other room into this one, and left a trail behind it, and he lay for a long time, wondering what the thing might be, with the queasiness of terror gnawing at his mind. For the thing might still be with him and it might be dangerous.
But he felt he was alone, sensed a loneness in the throbbing of the engine at his side…and it was thus for the first time that he knew the purring thing for what it was. Name and recognition had slipped into his consciousness without conscious effort, as if it were a thing he had known all the time, and now he knew what it was, except that it seemed to him the name had come ahead of recognition and that, he thought, was strange.
So the thing beside him was an engine and he was lying on the floor and the metal close above his head was a roof of some sort. A narrow space, he thought. A narrow space that housed an engine and a door that opened into another room.
A ship. That was it. He was in a ship. And the trail of dark that ran across the threshold.
At first he thought that some other thing, some imagined thing, had crawled in slime of its own making to mark the trail, but now he remembered. It had been himself…himself crawling to the engines.
Lying quietly, it came back to him and in wonder he tested his aliveness. He lifted a hand and felt his chest and the clothes were burned away and their scorched edges were crisp between his fingers, but his chest was whole…whole and smooth and hard. Good human flesh. No holes.
So it was possible, he thought. I remember that I wondered if it was…if Johnny might not have some trick up his sleeve, if my body might not have some capability which I could not suspect.
It sucked at the stars and it nibbled at the asteroid and it yearned toward the engines. It wanted energy. And the engines had the energy…more than the distant stars, more than the cold, frozen chunk of rock that was the asteroid.