Falcon switched on the sleep inducer, and consciousness faded swiftly out as the electric pulses surged gently through his brain. While Kon-Tiki fell oward Jupiter, gaining speed second by second in that enormous gravitad well, he slept without dreams. They always came when he awoke, he had brought his nightmares with him from Earth.

Yet he never dreamed of the crash itself, though he often found himself again face to face with that terrified superchimp, as he descended the spiral stairway between the collapsing gasbags. None of the simps had survived, those that were not killed outright were so badly injured that they had been painlessly “euthed’. He sometimes wondered why he dreamed only of this doomed creature which he had never met before the last minutes of its life and not of the friends and colleagues he had lost aboard the dying ~Queen.

The dreams he feared most always began with his first return to conciousness. There had been little physical pain, in fact, there had been no sensation of any kind. He was in darkness and silence, and did not even seem to be breathing. And strangest of all, he could not locate his limbs. He could move neither his hands nor his feet, because he did not know Where they were.

The silence had been the first to yield. After hours, or days, he had become aware of a faint throbbing, and eventually, after long thought, he deduced that this was the beating of his own heart. That was the first of his many mistakes.

Then there had been faint pinpricks, sparkles of light, ghosts of pressures upon still-unresponsive limbs. One by one his senses had returned, and pain had come with them. He had had to learn everything anew, recapitulating infancy and babyhood. Though his memory was unaffected, and he could understand words that were spoken to him, it was months before he was able to answer except by the flicker of an eyelid.