What am I doing here? Where am I? In the ocean? On the Moon? Taking part in some experiment…?

He refused to believe it was an experiment. What—vanish because of a little paraffin and a tankful of salt water? Hey! Enough of this crap. And he began to fight back against whatever it was; he exerted every muscle; it was like trying to heft a boulder. But there was nothing left of him, not enough to make his muscles flinch. During his last glimmer of consciousness he mustered the strength to groan—feeble and distant, the sound was like a radio signal from another planet.

For a second or so he almost revived, only to surrender to an even blacker, more nullifying ordeal.

He was not in any physical discomfort. If only it had hurt! If only he could have experienced a twinge of real pain, the kind that bestows limits, presence, confirmation of self… But it was painless, a numbing surge of nothingness. He felt the air rush into him—spasmodically, in snatches, not into his lungs but into that wilderness of shuddering, stunted thought-scraps. Whine, groan—anything to hear your own voice…

“You can moan without thinking of the stars,” said some intimate yet strangely anonymous voice.

Whine? Moan? How could he? He was dead. Extinct. Defunct. Look: he was a hole, a sieve, a labyrinth of tortuous caves and passages, transparent, porous… Oh, why hadn’t they told him it would be like this? Cold and clammy streams… they were running through him… freely… without obstruction… The bastards! Why hadn’t they told him?!

Soon the sensation of airy transparency gave way to raw fear, and it persisted—even after the darkness, convulsed by shimmering spasms, had vanished.

The worst was yet to come, but it defied description, even clear recollection; there was no vocabulary for it. Yes, the “victims” were the richer for the experience, the hellish nature of which escaped their professors—but it was scarcely an experience to be envied.