We might have been struck by some disturbance in the ether (I know nothing of space; the training processes told me only how to handle the crew and the stresses of the ship; space to me is an abstraction) which I could not understand, some gigantic compression or hand in space might have seized and squeezed us, perhaps it had been something for which we had no language at all; but as I tore myself to consciousness, like a beetle moving through layers of wood, it was this knowledge of irreplaceable loss that came atop the pain.
Pain and loss, loss and pain, the one felt, the other merely a constriction, but even as I tried to get out of the sac and deal with it, I had to lay back while the revivifying equipment, on automatic to my coming to consciousness, worked me over, massaging the body, restoring the mind, slowly elevating the respiration and circulation and it must have been twenty minutes, more than that, before I could stagger out of the tank and into the other equipment which cleaned and dressed me; it must have been more time after that until I was able finally to come into the sitting room of the ship and look out upon the heavens, the glaring and naked heavens, the unfamiliar stars pieced out in constellations for which we had no name, the ship reeling drunkenly in relation to those stars so that they appeared in right port, left port and center, the abscissa of the ship’s flight cutting new patterns and then, as I stared, blinking, charging long-departed moisture into my eyes, the heavens rolled once again, the deadly churning of the ship setting up complex patterns of nausea and retching and I grasped toward the bars, then righted myself as slowly the ship rotated in its course on a three hundred and sixty degree angle, moving not only parallel but centrifugal then to the universe and as it turned . . .
. . . As it turned the ship passed through a certain pattern at one hundred and twenty degrees which was familiar, the stars suddenly reordering themselves, the new patterns becoming constellations which were recognizable and on the brink of that vision I gasped; the ship was turning away then, at one hundred and forty degrees the pattern was already ruptured, at one hundred and eighty it was reassembled into something entirely different, a parody of what I had seen but that afterimage burned itself upon the retinas of my weary, barely reconstituted commander’s eyes and seeing it there I experienced a gasping moment of understanding in which I saw everything, knew then what had happened to us but the fracturing roll split the heavens apart and I staggered from the porthole, then tried to deny what I had seen, refusing it, reordering it into something else, but, then as I . . .
. . . Reeled back to my commander’s couch the vision was still there, the constellations reordered at a hundred and twenty degrees and I knew what had happened, I must have known it in sleep (sleep tossing me back toward that consumation of knowledge which waking had destroyed) and still I did not want to phrase it, did not want to bring it to the mind, a mind that was waxen from months behind the penitentiary of coma and so I suppressed it, put it below the shelf of consciousness not to be rummaged with and went to check on the rooms of my sleeping companions. In one room was Nina and in another was Stark and in the third was Closter just as I had remembered, each was immersed in the tanks, their bodies dark as fish under the surface of the water, the waters lapping, all peaceful, all of them . . . even the one that should have been waking was peaceful and knowing this I nodded once slightly, inhaling the odors of their sleep and then went back to my own place where I lay and rested and thought for a long time . . .
. . . Knowing that one of them was sleeping like a cheat, that instead of remaining awake as the fool should have done, the fool had cheated, refused to yield the biological clock and had placed himself in sleep once again and it was during this sleep that the lurch had come which was to wrench me from my own depths and I could not . . .
. . . Could not remember who it was supposed to be on alert, coma having purged so much from my mind; a simple glance at the logs in the deck would show me which of the three was the liar but I did not want to look. I could not bring myself to do that, lying instead that way . . .
. . . And knew what had happened to us, knew that that shock of dislocation meant this: that we had been thrown not out in space but back intime , that dislocative thrill which went to the root of the stalk of the unconscious, had cast us back in time causing us to fall deep into the pit of space and that the constellations I had seen were not foreign but were the familiar patterns of our Earth twisted by the ship’s dive through that opening in time momentarily out of focus, only to reassemble with the turning of the ship . . .
. . . Knew then that we were not journeying out but merelyback in time, the knowledge coming upon me with the horrid conviction and certainty with which, a long time after that, I had buried myself deep into Nina, into Stark, into Closter lest they find out what I knew and that what we were going to meet at the end of that voyage when the ship fell was not Folsom’s Planet at all but rather a prehistoricEarth and that we would be reconstructing to these barbarians all of our known history, that we might, in fact,be our history and let me tell you, gentlemen, this certainty . . .
. . . This absolute, thundering, certainty . . .
. . . Well, it is the kind of thing that might have driven a man mad if he had known it to be true, if he had accepted it, gentlemen, it would drive even the best of you mad, let alone the commander of this humble craft, the humble Hans Folsom, himself a man not unacquainted with sorrows or unfamiliar to grief who was hardly prepared to put up with stresses of this nature . . .
. . . Would, as I say, have driven better people than Folsom mad if they had accepted it, the conundrum that is: that he and his crew would have become their ownbiblicalancestorsbecauseofthisfallthroughthewarpintime , but fortunately for you, to say nothing of Folsom himself, fortunately for each and for everyone of us, Folsom refused to accept the fact that anything as bizarre as this could possibly be true and therefore he absolutely refused to accept it knowing that it was merely an insane delusion: there was no warp in time, there was no founder in the ship, there was merely the highly disturbed Folsom himself and his difficult relationship with situations which he could not understand and therefore . . . well, therefore, gentlemen, Folsom was not driven insane at all; Folsom denied all of this and was able to function quite well despite his period of uncertainty in the ship alone with the sleepers and the cheating sleeper . . . although, now that this has been revealed, you can understand quite well why Folsom might have been driven to precipitate action by the naming of the alienEzekiel . Surely that is fully understandable.
But otherwise his conduct is beyond reproach.
I am sure that even by your own rigorous terms this will explain everything.