HE stumbled as he went through the door. There was a sudden feeling of vertigo, and he instinctively put out his arms to keep his balance. It was a small room for the number of people in it, and for a moment he wondered if he was in a descending elevator.

“You’ll gel used to it in a moment,” said the woman he had met earlier. Her face was pale, as if she had recently received some kind of shock, but her smile was reassuring and sympathetic. Apart from her there were six other people in the room, three women and three men of different ages and nationalities, and some of them smiled as well. They were all standing in front of the window, but they moved aside to let Martin see the view.

At first glance the stretch of harshly-lit, stony, and obviously airless ground made him think that he was on the moon-the low gravity would have explained his difficulty in keeping balance. But it was not the moon, he saw as soon as he raised his eyes above the horizon.

The sky blazed with stars-singly, in clusters, and in great, swirling, jeweled eddies-and so dense was the star field that it was difficult to find even a tiny part of the sky which was completely dark. Except, that was, in one area high overhead where there hung an enormous, black, featureless shape which looked at least twenty times larger than the disk of the full moon seen from Earth.

It was the shape of the Federation symbol.

Martin became aware slowly that his pulse was hammering loudly in his ears, and that he had been looking at the sky with such an intensity of wonder that he had forgotten to breathe. He took a ragged breath and said, “Is-is it some kind of black hole?”