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    “You were the executive officer on the X n ship
Outbound
,” said the Doctor, “an Explorer class discovery vessel launched from Terra Central on a mission to penetrate the galactic arm and make certain experiments in intragalactic space, among them being to test a new version of the flicker-field mode of faster-than-light travel. A design error caused the vessel to accelerate out of control to velocities exceeding anything regarded at the time as theoretically possible. Compounding the
Outbound
disaster was the ship’s ability to gatherintergalactic hydrogen molecules for fuel, which, at the unexpected velocities, caused an increment exceeding expenditure of fuel. The only possible result must have been an explosion or other disruption of the vessel. What actually happened is not known, because by the time it happened the ship was far outside any possibility of detection.”
    Case felt a flash of irritation. “If you’ve picked all this out of my head already, why go over it?”
    Gently the Doctor said, “We took nothing from you, Case. We respect personal integrity above all other things, and the privacy of a man’s choices are his own. No: what I have just said came from the archives.”
    Archives. Not files or retrieval banks—archives. “How long were we—was the
Outbound
, lost?”
    “By Terra Central reckoning—some twelve hundred years.”
    “I couldn’t have been suspended for twelve hundred years!”
    “You weren’t. You died.”
    After a time the Doctor said, “Would you like to be by yourself?”
    “If you don’t mind,” Case whispered.
    The blue man faded and disappeared: Case saw this, but could only stare dully.
    Jan. Oh, Jan …
    His mind then for a while was a wordless throb. Deep in his mind, where lives the observer all of us carry—the merciless one who stands off watching—was name-calling:
Idiot! Sentimental slob! Why is it a greater grief to you to know she is a thousand years dead than a mere two hundred? And angry, are you? Angry! What are you going to do with your anger?
    “Something,” he whispered. “Something …”
    He flicked a slitted glance around. There was nothing in this bland place to strike out against, so with one blow he fisted his palm so hard he numbed it; and while waiting for it to begin to ache, he saw in memory a flash of ugly laughter. It was laughter all but standing alone, mouthless, deep, cheerful—the cheerfulness of a man with a better mousetrap; and Case (and Jan, and Jan) the mice. Why couldn’the remember the mouth, the face, the situation? For he
saw
this laugh in memory, he did not hear it.
    Occlusion—the profound will not to remember. Occlusion is an act of survival, an unwillingness to replay some terrible shock. Yet occluded matter always leaves a trigger in plain sight (here, a visible laugh) and that is also a survival trait; for the deep mind wants always to know where the danger is, and what to fear. To be as close to his deep mind as Case was (his training had made him so) was to tread always the edge of internal terrors, to be placed always at the point of decision: shall I recall the trauma? or bury the trigger again?—for only at this edge did he have the ability to react with the fabled swiftness of the X n Corps.
    He let the trigger, the laugh, fade and closed his eyes, commanding some alternative to come to mind. Anything. Anything else, anything instead. Something, perhaps, before the laughter.
    Something like: before the laughter was the chase, and before that the landing, and before that the lifeboat, and before that … before that no one would ever know, because they had abandoned ship in the flickering grayness of translight velocity, under or over, who knew? There was no instrumentation for that, and no instruments told the truth anyway; electrons flowed in strange ways, coils and fields were distorted and wild. No one had ever been there before, no probe had ever reported back. Scuttlebutt, off-duty talk: