That made him think again as he prowled. So the metal people needed handles and locks! Then they couldn’t jump about in space as magically as they wanted you to think they could. Whatever the trick was, it wasn’t teleportation or time-travel. It was an illusion, or something else to do with the mind, as both Carl and Jeanette had guessed: memory-blanking, or mind-reading. But which?
After he had crept along for what seemed like a mile, the elliptical pathway inflected and began to broaden. Also there was a difference in the quality of the light up ahead: it seemed brighter, and, somehow, more natural. The ceiling was becoming higher, too. He was coming into a new kind of area; and for some reason he did not stop to examine – perhaps only that the inside curve of the corridor was on his right, which as evidence was good for nothing – he felt that he was coming up on the front of the ship.
He had barely begun to register the changes when the corridor put forth a pseudopod: a narrow, shallow, metal stairway which led up to what looked like the beginning of a catwalk, off to the left. He detoured instinctively – in the face of the unknown, hide and peek!
As he went along the outward-curving catwalk, the space ahead of him continued to grow bigger and more complicated, and after a few minutes he saw that his sensation that he was going bow-wards had been right. The catwalk ran up and around a large chamber, shaped like a fan opened from this end, and ending in an immense picture window through which daylight poured over a cascade of instruments. On the right side of the room was a separate, smaller bank of controls, divided into three ranks of buttons each arranged in an oval, and surmounted by a large clock-face like the one Carl had noticed when he first awoke in the ship’s EEG room. The resemblance to the cockpit of a jetliner, writ large, was unmistakable; this was the ship’s control room.