“Yeah? Greg, you must’ve taken lessons. No one could put Pollyanna that far out of the running without. What do we eat? What do we drink? Where are we? How do we get back? And in case of accident, to what exit and in what spacesuit do we run, not walk? I haven’t even seen a bathroom in the place, or those little conveniences that go along with bathrooms. Sure, we’re being taken care of—but good?”

The voice that interrupted Donovan’s tirade was not Powell’s. It was nobody’s. It was there, hanging in open air—stentorian and petrifying in its effects.

“GREGORY POWELL! MICHAEL DONOVAN! GREGORY POWELL! MICHAEL DONOVAN! PLEASE REPORT YOUR PRESENT POSITIONS. IF YOUR SHIP ANSWERS CONTROLS, PLEASE RETURN TO BASE. GREGORY POWELL! MICHAEL DONOVAN!—”

The message was repetitious, mechanical, broken by regular, untiring intervals.

Donovan said, “Where’s it coming from?”

“I don’t know.” Powell’s voice was an intense whisper, “Where do the lights come from? Where does anything come from?”

“Well, how are we going to answer?” They had to speak in the intervals between the loudly echoing, repeating message.

The walls were bare—as bare and as unbroken as smooth, curving metal can be. Powell said, “Shout an answer.”

They did. They shouted, in turns, and together, “Position unknown! Ship out of control! Condition desperate!”

Their voices rose and cracked. The short business-like sentences became interlarded and adulterated with screaming and emphatic profanity, but the cold, calling voice repeated and repeated and repeated unwearyingly.

“They don’t hear us,” gasped Donovan. “There’s no sending mechanism. Just a receiver.” His eyes focused blindly at a random spot on the wall.

Slowly the din of the outside voice softened and receded. They called again when it was a whisper, and they called again, hoarsely, when there was silence.

Something like fifteen minutes later, Powell said lifelessly, “Let’s go through the ship again. There must be something to eat somewheres.” He did not sound hopeful. It was almost an admission of defeat.

They divided in the corridor to the right and left. They could follow one another by the hard footsteps resounding, and they met occasionally in the corridor, where they would glare at each other and pass on.

Powell’s search ended suddenly and as it did, he heard Donovan’s glad voice rise boomingly.

“Hey, Greg,” it howled, “the ship has got plumbing. How did we miss it?”

It was some five minutes later that he found Powell by hit-and-miss. He was saying, “Still no shower baths, though,” but it got choked off in the middle.

“Food,” he gasped.

The wall had dropped away, leaving a curved gap with two shelves. The upper shelf was loaded with unlabeled cans of a bewildering variety of sizes and shapes. The enameled cans on the lower shelf were uniform and Donovan felt a cold draft about his ankles. The lower half was refrigerated.

“How… how—”

“It wasn’t there, before,” said Powell, curtly. “That wall section dropped out of sight as I came in the door.”