It was a wondrous world. He walked in halls of polished marble and looked out through colonnades across a bright blue sea. Gentle breezes carried flowers' perfumes to him. Wine warmed his throat. Music rippled in faint, nostalgic waves. Yet he knew no joy, for loneliness ached dull underneath his breastbone. First listless, then feverish, he wandered in and out among the columns, ever seeking. Servitors brought rare foods, sun-blushing fruits, to tempt his palate; and there were women who pressed themselves upon him, seducing him with eye and voice and touch. But he brushed by; he would have none of them. He saw the blue sea as a wasteland. The wine turned bitter in his mouth. Then, suddenly, _she_ was there, a fairy figure far off amid the towering pillars. With a glad cry, he ran towards her. But she laughed and flitted away before him. And when he tried to follow, dusk came, casting ebon shadows, and he could not find her, and he threw himself down on the hard bed of the marble, bruised and broken. "Eileen--!" he moaned. "Eileen...." As from afar, a voice said, "That's right. Another shot of vorghon." He turned his head, ever so slowly. He forced his burning, heavy-lidded eyes to open. A man in the white jacket of the medcorps stood beside him, smiling. "Good," the man said. "I knew we'd do it. Vorghon always brings them around." "You hit it, all right." It was another medman speaking. "For awhile there, I'd begun to wonder. But that last shot turned the trick." Again Boone whispered: "Eileen--where is she?" "Eileen, did you say? The first of the medmen came down closer. Some girl? You were alone, you know, aboard the carrier." "The ... carrier--?" "You don't remember that part, even?" The medman's brow furrowed deeper. His eyes flicked to his fellow for the fraction of a second as if in wordless exclamation, then came back to Boone again. "You were aboard a sphere-ship bound for Titan. Then the monsters hit it and all hands took off. When we picked you up, you were in an EC carrier, drifting just out of Hyperion's orbit." He chuckled. "You were out of your head at the time. Someplace along the line you'd gotten pretty sick." Boone tried to drag himself up but found his arms were pinioned. "I was on Hyperion!" he mumbled. "I didn't leave the ship; it crashed down through the ice-shell. Eileen was with me--" But the medman had straightened. He was not listening. "Another shot for this lad," he clipped briskly. "Make it equal parts of vorghon and anhalsax." "Right, sir," the second medman nodded. Boone glimpsed an aerojet descending. Then he was off again--off on another nightmare chase, following Eileen through sifting spheres of light and darkness. This time, at last, he caught her. Only when he would have put his arms about her, she suddenly changed into a faceless, somehow leering Helgae. But the haze was gone when he roused again, and he felt better.