A curious, heavy sound impinged upon Gosseyn's attention.  It seemed to come from above him.  It grew louder rapidly and became a continuous noise, like the roar of many smoothly operating machines.

Gosseyn opened his eyes.  He was lying in half darkness beside the trunk of a titanic tree.  He could see two more trunks dimly in the near distance, but their size was so improbable that he closed his eyes and lay quiet, listening.  He had no other immediate awareness.  His brain was a composite of ears and what the ears were hearing.  Nothing else.  He was an inanimate object with the ability to detect sounds.

Further awareness crept in upon him.  He could feel his body lying on the ground.  No visual image was involved, but gradually the impression in his mind extended.  Himself being held up by the soil of Venus, solidly, strongly supported by the impregnable planetary base that was Venus.

The slow flow of thoughts changed.  Venus!  But he wasn't on Venus.  He was on Earth.  Memory awakened in a remoter section of his mind.  The trickle of impulse-patterns became a stream, then a wide, dark river rushing toward a great sea.

"I died," he told himself.  "I was shot and burned to death."

He cringed with the remembrance of hideous pain.  His body pressed hard against the ground.  Slowly his mind opened out again.  The fact that he was alive with the memory of having been killed became less a thing of remembered agony, more a puzzle, a paradox that had no apparent explanation in the null-A world.

The fear that the pain would resume dimmed with the passing of the uneventful minutes.  His thought, in that curious semiconscious world in which he had his momentary being, began to concentrate on different aspects of his situation.

He remembered Patricia Hardie and her father.  He remembered "X" and the implacable Thorson, and that there was a plot against null-A.

The memory had an enormous, purely physical effect on him.  He sat up.  He opened his eyes and found himself in the same half darkness as before; it had not been a dream then.

He saw the monstrous trees again.  This time he accepted them for what they were.  It was they that must have given him his automatic knowledge that he was on Venus.  Everybody knew about the trees on Venus.

He was definitely on Venus.