"Yes, I'm all right." She lay quietly on the table. "What year is this?" she asked.

"It's 6948," he told her.

Her eyes widened and she looked at him with a startled glance. "Almost a thousand years," she said. "You are sure of the year?"

He nodded. "That is about the only thing that I am really sure of."

"How is that?"

"Why, finding you here," said Gary, "and reviving you again. I still don't believe it happened."

She laughed, a funny, discordant laugh because her muscles, inactive for years, had forgotten how to function rightly.

"You are Caroline Martin, aren't you?" asked Gary.

She gave him a quick look of surprise and rose to a sitting position.

"I am Caroline Martin," she answered. "But how did you know that?"

Gary gestured at the diploma. "I read it."

"Oh," she said. "I'd forgotten all about it."

"I am Gary Nelson," he told her. "Newsman on the loose. My pal's out there in a spaceship waiting for us."

"I suppose," she said, "that I should thank you, but I don't know how. Just ordinary thanks aren't quite enough."

"Skip it," said Gary, tersely.

She stretched her arms above her head.

"It's good to be alive again," she said. "Good to know there's life ahead of you."

"But," said Gary, "you always were alive. It must have been just like going to sleep."

"It wasn't sleep," she said. "It was worse than death. Because, you see, I made one mistake."

"One mistake?"

"Yes, just one mistake. One you'd never think of. At least, I didn't. You see, when animation was suspended every physical process was reduced to almost zero, metabolism slowed down to almost nothing. But with one exception. My brain kept right on working."

The horror of it sank into Gary slowly. "You mean you knew?"

She nodded. "I couldn't hear or see or feel. I had no bodily sensation. But I could think. I've thought for almost ten centuries. I tried to stop thinking, but I never could.

I prayed something would go wrong and I would die. Anything at all to end that eternity of thought."

She saw the pity in his eyes.

"Don't waste sympathy on me," she said and there was a note of hardness in her voice. "I brought it on myself. Stubbornness, perhaps. I played a long shot. I took a gamble."

He chuckled in his throat. "And won."

"A billion to one shot," she said. "Probably greater odds than that. It was madness itself to do it. This shell is a tiny speck in space. There wasn't, I don't suppose, a billion-to-one chance, if you figured it out on paper, that anyone would find me. I had some hope. Hope that would have reduced those odds somewhat. I placed my faith on someone and I guess they failed me. Perhaps it wasn't their fault. Maybe they died before they could even hunt for me."

"But how did you do it?" asked Gary. "Even today suspended animation has our scientists stumped. They've made some progress but not much. And you made it work a thousand years ago."

"Drugs," she said. "Certain Martian drugs. Rare ones. And they have to be combined correctly. Slow metabolism to a point where it is almost non-existent. But you have to be careful. Slow it down too far and metabolism stops. That's death."

Gary gestured toward the hypodermic. "And that," be said, "reacts against the other drug."

She nodded gravely.

"The fluid in the tank," he said. "That was to prevent dehydration and held some food value? You wouldn't need much food with metabolism at nearly zero. But how about your mouth and nostrils? The fluid…"

"A mask," she said. "Chemical paste that held up under moisture. Evaporated as soon as it was struck by air."

"You thought of everything."

"I had to," she declared. "There was no one else to do my thinking for me."

She slid off the table and walked slowly toward him.

"You told me a minute ago," she said, "that the scientists of today haven't satisfactorily solved suspended animation."

He nodded.

"You mean to say they still don't know about these drugs?"

"There are some of them," he said, "who'd give their good right arm to know about them."

"We knew about them a thousand years ago," the girl said. "Myself and one other. I wonder…"

She whirled on Gary. "Let's get out of here," she cried. "I have a horror of this place."

"Anything you want to take?" he asked. "Anything I can get together for you?"

She made an impatient gesture.

"No," she said. "I want to forget this place."

CHAPTER Three

The Space Pup arrowed steadily toward Pluto. From the engine room came the subdued hum of the geosectors. The vision plate looked out on ebon space with its far-flung way posts of tiny, steely stars. The needle was climbing up near the thousand-miles-a-second mark.

Caroline Martin leaned forward in her chair and stared out at the vastness that stretched eternally ahead. "I could stay and watch forever," she exulted.

Gary, lounging back in the pilot's seat, said quietly:

"I've been thinking about that name of yours. It seems to me I've heard it somewhere. Read it in a book."

She glanced at him swiftly and then stared out into space.

"Perhaps you have," she said finally.

There was a silence, unbroken except by the humming of the geosectors.

The girl turned back to Gary, chin cupped in her hands. "Probably you have read about me;" she said. "Perhaps the name of Caroline Martin is mentioned in your histories. You see, I was a member of the old Mars-Earth Research commission during the war with Jupiter. I was so proud of the appointment. Just four years out of school and I was trying so hard to get a good job in some scientific research work. I wanted to earn money to go back to school again."

"I'm beginning to remember now," said Gary, "but there must be something wrong. The histories say you were a traitor. They say you were condemned to death."

"I was a traitor," she said and there was a thread of ancient bitterness in the words she spoke. "I refused to turn over a discovery I made, a discovery that would have won the war. It also would have wrecked the solar system. I told them so, but they were men at war. They were desperate men. We were losing then."

"We never did win, really," Gary told her.

"They condemned me to space," she said. "They put me in that shell you found me in and a war cruiser towed it out to Pluto's orbit and cut it loose. It was an old condemned craft, its machinery outmoded. They ripped out the rockets and turned it into a prison for me."

She made a gesture of silence at the shocked look on their faces.

"The histories don't tell that part of it," said Herb.

"They probably suppressed it," she said. "Men at war will do things that no sane man will do. They would not admit in peace the atrocities that they committed in the time of battle. They put the laboratory in the control room as a final ironic jest. So I could carry out my research, they said. Research, they told me, I'd not need to turn over to them."

"Would your discovery have wrecked the system?"

Gary asked.

"Yes," she said, "it would have. That's why I refused to give it to the military board. For that they called me traitor. I think they hoped to break me. I think they thought up to the very last that, faced with exile in space, I would finally crack and give it to them."

"When you didn't," Herb said, "they couldn't back down. They couldn't afford to let you call their bluff."

"They never found your notes," said Gary.

She tapped her forehead with a slender finger. "My notes were here," she said.

He looked amazed.

"And still are," she said.

"But how did you get the drugs to carry out your suspended animation?" Gary asked.

She waited for long minutes.

"That's the part I hate to think about," she said. "The part that's hard to think about. I worked with a young man. About my age, then. He must be dead these many years."