Both problemsthat of how much force he could exert with his body, and how long he could hope to be asleep in his mindemerged simultaneously into the forefront of his consciousness while he still sat inertly on the hammock, their terms still much muddled together. After the single tick of the calendar, the shipor the part of it that Garrard could see from heresettled back into complete rigidity. The sound of the engines, too, did not seem to vary in frequency or am-plitude, at least as far as his ears could tell. He was still not breathing. Nothing moved, nothing changed.
It was the fact that he could still detect no motion of his diaphragm or his rib cage that decided him at last. His body had to be keeping ship-time, otherwise he would have blacked out from oxygen starvation long before now. That assumption explained, too, those two incredibly prolonged, seemingly sourceless saturnalias of emotion through which he had suf-fered: they had been nothing more nor less than the response of his endocrine glands to the purely intellectual reactions he had experienced earlier. He had discovered that he was not breathing, had felt a flash of panic and had tried to sit up.
Long after his mind had forgotten those two impulses, they had inched their way from his brain down his nerves to the glands and muscles involved, and actual, physical panic had supervened. When that was over, he actually was sitting up, though the flood of adrenalin had prevented his noticing the motion as he had made it. The later chillless violent, and apparently associated with the discovery that he might die long before the trip was completedactually had been his body’s response to a much earlier mental commandthe ab-stract fever of interest he had felt while computing the time differential had been responsible for it.