CHAPTER XI

FUNNEL: Lying in the ship in the days before the descent, in the pit of sleep, Folsom had had a dream and in that dream he had been screaming in space. Suspended without the protective hulk of the ship, bare to the ether itself, he had hung in the small, gravitational field which the ship projected and traveling along-side it, a mote in the endless universe, he had screamed and screamed for a thousand years while the ship had turned itself around slowly and begun its cautious, graceful descent toward the surface of the planet.

The dream had been so vivid that Folsom, even though he had known with some open layer of the mind that it was only hallucinative, had felt himself possessed with the real conviction that he was subsisting in space, alternately freezing and being devoured by flame as the ship closed its gap of space and time. He had hovered in the field like an insect, shouting and battering at the hull, pleading with his companions to save him but of course all of his companions were sleeping so there was no help in that direction. There was no help in any direction at all. Folsom knew that he would die out there.

Amazingly and despite the lack of atmosphere he did not. He lived without breathing, circled without motion, screamed without sound. Oddly, despite the obvious difficulty of his circumstances he seemed capable of surviving. Space came in upon him in its nakedness and its power but space did not wrest from Folsom the gestures of his mortality. It was, in that sense, a dream which had not only a powerful sense of conviction but an ironic undercurrent. It seemed to be not only a terrible and tragic way to suffer through the months of unconscious but a wry comment upon his condition. For what was he if not suspended in space, what was he if not in the sleep without mortality? Folsom, not a reflective type, could, upon emerging from his (for every element of the dream was accessible to him, he could reach with a retrospective finger through to the unconscious and rummage with it) see the justice to it.

It was as if some great dislocative murmur of the ship, perhaps as it hit an obstruction in space, had jolted him into the corridors of his dream for he remembered distinctly that he had not slid into unconsciousness with it but had, indeed, found it under that layer. Something must have happened to them in the voyage but what it could be Folsom did not have the slightest idea. He never discussed his dream with the others—they simply did not talk about things like this—but from certain furtive aspects of their expressions in the first hours of shared awakeness, when together they had prepared the ship for its descent, he had had the feeling that so it had been with all of them, that something had happened to send all of them into space screaming and now they would never talk about it.

This was a shame. Folsom wished they had. He might have learned something, checking all of this through. Of course it is all too late, now. Most of it.