Something changed, hardened, in Vaillant's flat face. He said, "I expected it. I'll be right there. You know what to do." He did something to the disk and spoke into it again. "Paula, take over here." He stood up. Kieran looked up at him, feeling numb and stupid. "I'd like to know some things." "Later," said Vaillant. "We've got troubles. Stay where you are." He went rapidly out of the room. Kieran looked after him, wondering. Troubles--troubles in a starship? And a century had passed-- He suddenly felt an emotion that shook his nerves and tightened his guts. It was beginning to hit him now. He sat up in the bunk and swung his legs out of it and tried to stand but could not, he was too weak. All he could do was to sit there, shaking. His mind could not take it in. It seemed only minutes ago that he had been walking along the corridor in Wheel Five. It seemed that Wheel Five must exist, that the Earth, the people, the time he knew, must still be somewhere out there. This could be some kind of a joke, or some kind of psychological experiment. That was it--the space-medicine boys were always making way-out experiments to find out how men would bear up in unusual conditions, and this must be one of them-- A woman came into the room. She was a dark woman who might have been thirty years old, and who wore a white shirt and slacks. She would, he thought, have been good-looking if she had not looked so tired and so edgy. She came over and looked down at him and said to him, "Don't try to get up yet. You'll feel better very soon." Her voice was a slightly husky one. It was utterly familiar to Kieran, and yet he had never seen this woman before. Then it came to him. "You were the one who talked to me," he said, looking up at her. "In the dreams, I mean." She nodded. "I'm Paula Ray and I'm a psychologist. You had to be psychologically prepared for your awakening." "Prepared?" The woman explained patiently. "Hypnopedic technique--establishing facts in the subconscious of a sleeping patient. Otherwise, it would be too terrific a shock for you when you awakened. That was proved when they first tried reviving space-struck men, forty or fifty years ago." * * * * * The comfortable conviction that this was all a fake, an experiment of some kind, began to drain out of Kieran. But if it was true-- He asked, with some difficulty, "You say that they found out how to revive space-frozen men, that long ago?" "Yes." "Yet it took forty or fifty years to get around to reviving me?" The woman sighed. "You have a misconception. The process of revival was perfected that long ago. But it has been used only immediately after a wreck or disaster. Men or women in the old space-cemeteries have not been revived." "Why not?" he asked carefully.