His sight began to clear, and that pressure of roaring blood decreased in his ears, and his stiffened feet began to ache again to the good warmth of the floor.
Jane Carter was still in his arms, limp and silent.
Catching her thin blue wrist, he felt no pulse.
Her flesh seemed very cold, even to his numbed hands, and he thought she must be dead.
He was bending to lay her down when he felt a sudden warmth - as if some psychokinetic force, he thought, had acted directly upon her to accelerate the molecular motion of heat.
She shuddered convulsively, drawing a long sighing breath.
Her dark eyes opened, seeing again, full of a complete devotion.
"Oh, thank you, Dr. Forester!" Now he could hear the grave sweetness of her voice, her own again.
Seeming fully restored, she slipped quickly out of his arms. Her smile was human now, relaxed and glad.
"I think Mr. White would say you're very, very good!"
Puzzled again by her sudden recovery, Forester looked around him with a mounting bewilderment.
Any aid or shelter for them, on this long-dead wanderer of the dark, had seemed unbelievably improbable, and now he began to notice singular things about this oddly convenient haven.
Certainly it wasn't a billion years old.
The clean warm air had a faint smell of new paint.
The buttons which worked the valves were made of the newest sort of translucent synthetic - and all neatly labeled in his own language.
Riveted to the case of the control mechanism was the familiar name plate of the Acme Engineering Corporation - a small firm which had contracted to supply certain machinings for the neutrino search tubes of his own Project Lookout.
Calling up the courage to experiment, he gingerly pushed the button marked
"Inner Valve - To Open."
Something hummed inside the case. An amber light flashed, and a warning gong rang.
And another heavy wedge of polished steel slid down, to let them into the shelter.
Quivering with a voiceless astonishment, he led the child inside.
Exploring this enigmatic sanctuary, they followed a wide passage back into the rock.
Plates of smoothly welded metal lined it, painted with the same shades of cream and gray that Forester had chosen for his own office back at Starmont.
The soft illumination came from recessed fluorescent fixtures - which bore the familiar trade-mark of United Electric.
Doors were spaced along the tunnel, fitted with knobs for a man to turn.
Forester pushed them open as he passed, to look dazedly into the rooms beyond.
The first housed a power plant, with a small rotary converter humming silently beside a bank of transformers, and a stand-by unit waiting.
Searching for the generator, he caught his breath. For all the power seemed to come from a single small cell, with a name plate which read,
"Starmont Rhodomagnetic Research Foundation."
Forester blinked at the outrageous impossibility of that.
Once, it was true, he had dreamed of establishing a nonprofit foundation to develop rhodomagnetics for peacetime usefulness, but the harsh demands of military security had killed that bright hope, along with many another.
If that research project had never even existed ...
He stumbled blankly on, searching for a sane explanation.
The next room was a kitchen - oddly like Ruth's had been, in the little house the humanoids had wrecked when they took over Starmont.
The electric range and the streamlined refrigerator were the same white and shining United Electric models and the canned and packaged food stacked in the shelves was all gaudy with the same familiar labels of standard brands.
He found a room for himself, and a smaller one for Jane.
The table beside his bed was thoughtfully stacked with a dozen of his favorite books - but there was none, he saw with a faint disappointment, that he hadn't read.
The bathroom was even supplied with the soap and toothpaste he liked, and the razor on the shelf was incredibly like his own.
At the farther end of the tunnel, a narrow stair led upward.
They climbed it breathlessly, and came up into the crystal-domed cupola that he had seen from outside.
Chilled with an increasing awed perplexity, he stood staring at the dead landscape beyond the curving panels.
Nothing had changed, outside.
The cruel sky was black and strange. The high curve of the galaxy stood like a leaning plume of silver dust beyond that empty valley where nothing could have lived within imaginable time, its pale radiance falling faint and cold on the naked cliffs and the low, eroded hills beyond the gravel fields that water once had washed.
Leaning on a little table under the center of that impossible dome, to ease his weary knee, Forester stood a long time looking dully at that tall splendid arch of silver mist and diamond dust.
The biting cold and the brooding loneliness of this deadly night took hold of him again, and he shuddered convulsively.
Jane Carter caught his hand, to whisper anxiously:
"Is it something very bad?"
"Nothing bad." He smiled down at her apprehensive face with the best assurance he could manufacture.
"I just don't understand.
I don't know how we got here - so far from home that all the stars men ever knew are lost in that cloud, yonder.