He was back, physically and mentally, aboard his spaceship. His thoughts still flowed sluggishly, as after a long sleep.
How long had he been carbonised, in that deep sleep that wasn’t real sleep?
He took a deep breath.
He immediately felt a little tension in his shoulder, no pain, more of an ancient, actually pleasant feeling that he knew from childhood days: when, for example, a wound healed that he had suffered in a fall off his bike, or that laceration on the forehead as the baseball hit him with unexpected force.
That alarmed him. A pain in the shoulder? He kept his eyes closed. He didn’t want to show anyone that he was awake.
When and how should he have sustained an injury – during suspension? Nothing and nobody could have attacked him. Everything in him urged to jump up and see what was going on. But he suppressed that impulse.
First he had to be sure of himself.
Keeping his lids closed, he continued to probe his body. He was still in that machine that had dematerialized and stored him. Only in that state between reality and another dimension, could the fall through space and time be survived. The music came very muffled through the glass of the vaulted container in which he had slept for hundreds, thousands… maybe millions of years. This music… it reminded him of something… like a dream that shortly after waking up is already incomprehensible.