He listened to the humming. It was even and placid, and not very loud, but it disturbed him deeply. The overdrive was supposed to be inaudible, and the tapes from the first unmanned test vehicles had recorded no such hum. The noise did not appear to interfere with the overdrive’s opera-tion, or to indicate any failure in it. It was just an irrelevancy for which he could find no reason.
But the reason existed. Garrard did not intend to do so much as draw another breath until he found out what it was.
Incredibly, he realized for the first time that he had not in fact drawn one single breath since he had first come to.
Though he felt not the slightest discomfort, the discovery called up so overwhelming a flash of panic that he very nearly sat bolt upright on the couch. Luckilyor so it seemed, after the panic had begun to ebbthe curious leth-argy which had affected his eyelids appeared to involve his whole body, for the impulse was gone before he could sum-mon the energy to answer it. And the panic, poignant though it had been for an instant, turned out to be wholly intellectual. In a moment, he was observing that his failure to breathe in no way discommoded him as far as he could tell it was just there, waiting to be explained …
Or to kill him. But it hadn’t, yet.
Engines humming; eyelids heavy; breathing absent; calendar stopped. The four facts added up to nothing. The temptation to move somethingeven if it were only a big toe was strong, but Garrard fought it back. He had been awake only a short whilehalf an hour at mostand already had noticed four abnormalities. There were bound to be more, anomalies more subtle than these four; but available to close examination before he had to move. Nor was there anything in particular that he had to do, aside from caring for his own wants; the Project, on the chance that Brown’s and Cellini’s failure to return had resulted from some tampering with the overdrive, had made everything in the DFC-3 subject only to the computer. In a very real sense, Garrard was just along for the ride. Only when the overdrive was off could he adjust