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considered to be a sufficiency of spirit, the Captain was now engaged in chewing glucose tablets. Phylo watched him with silent awe.
    Eventually Kobler looked up from his cosmometer. “Nine minutes to go, Captain,” he said formally.
    Mauris glanced at the bulkhead electxochron and nodded. “Five hundred seconds,” he said pleasantly. “And then sixteen hundred thousand light-years. . . . Science is quite wonderful.”
    Kobler was nettled. “What are you eating—nerve pills?”
    “Glucose,” said Mauris affably. “I’ve been dieting on whiskey and glucose.”
    “Why?”
    “Because,” explained Mauris, “I intend to keep both warm and energetic.”
    “There should not be any drop in temperature,” said Kobler. “In any case, the thermostat will fix it.”
    “The nonexistent thermostat,” corrected Mauris gently. “But I was not thinking of coldness that can be measured in degrees centigrade.”
    “There is no other,” said Kobler authoritatively. “Neither is there any need to keep your strength up. There will be no fatigue.”
    “Nor was I thinking of physical fatigue.”
    Kobler shrugged. “Every man to his own superstitions,” he said.
    Captain Mauris smiled. “Would it be indiscreet to suggest that yours are non-Euclidean?”
    Kobler turned away in disgust and spoke to one of his aides. “Get everyone in their contour berths and switch the auto-announcer on. We might as well let the brain take over.”
    Captain Mauris made a last attempt to be helpful.
    “It is well known,” he said placidly, “that smooth motion never made anybody tired. But I am not so sure about smooth stillness. It may be very fatiguing. , . . Perhaps it may even be possible for a nonexistent man to be too tired  to maintain his nonexistent bodily heat. . . . Would you care for some glucose?”
    Kobler did not turn around, but his shoulders shook convulsively. Captain Mauris interpreted the movement as one of silent laughter.
    “One minute to deceleration point,” boomed the autoannouncer.
    Men with strained faces lay strapped on their contour berths awaiting the indefinable shock, of total stillness. They stared with unseeing eyes at their neighbors, at the bulkhead, at the fat, ominous copper cylinder. Phylo’s lips were quivering; Captain Mauris, in spite of his lighthearted precautions, felt a strange icy finger probing his heart; even Kobler’s massive confidence wavered as the critical moment drew near.
    “Forty-five seconds,” said that damnably calm automatic voice. “Thirty seconds . . . fifteen seconds . . . ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—zero!”
    And then' there was nothing—no lurch, no pressure, no sudden stress. Only a great vacancy, a sensation of utter darkness, a sharp instantaneous dream of unbeing, and then only the bare memory of the dream.
    In the dimensions of physical space, the Santa Maria and all aboard her had ceased to exist. Where, before, a tiny metallic capsule—a caravel of explorers—had surged out from the dustlike brood of planets circling one of the innumerable suns, there was now nothing. The track of a strange silver bullet, coursing at a fantastic speed that was yet a mere snail’s pace through the long deserts of the home galaxy, had stopped suddenly. There was no wreckage, there were no survivors. For what had existed in the apparent reality of space-time was now as if it had never been. . . .
    Captain Mauris was alone. He was alone because there  was nothing else. He was alone with the illusion of his own existence. The stillness had settled like a slow inward frost.
    His premonition was justified. In a vacancy of nonsensation, there was yet the overwhelming weight of a curious fatigue—as if, at the moment of deceleration, the material cosmos had suddenly become too tired to hold together. As if Mauris himself must support the tiredness of a phantom universe.
    “So this is what it’s like to be dead,”