After five minutes had gone by with no apparent change in his situation, Karlsen realized that he might be going to live for a while yet.  And as soon as this happened, as soon as his mind dared open its eyes again, so to speak, he began to see the depths of space around him and what they held.

There followed a short time during which he seemed unable to move; a few minutes passed while he thought he might go mad.

He rode in a crystalline bubble of a launch about twelve feet in diameter.  The fortunes of war had dropped him here, halfway down the steepest gravitational hill in the known universe.

At the unseeable bottom of this hill lay a sun so massive that not a quantum of light could escape it with a visible wavelength.  In less than a minute he and his raindrop of a boat had fallen here, some unmeasurable distance out of normal space, trying to escape an enemy.  Karlsen had spent that falling minute in prayer, achieving something like calm, considering himself already dead.

But after that minute he was suddenly no longer falling.  He seemed to have entered an orbit - an orbit that no man had ever traveled before, amid sights no eyes had ever seen.

He rode above a thunderstorm at war with a sunset -  a ceaseless, soundless turmoil of fantastic clouds that filled half the sky like a nearby planet.  But this cloud-mass was immeasurably bigger than any planet, vaster even than most giant stars.  Its core and its cause was a hypermassive sun a billion times the weight of Sol.

The clouds were interstellar dust swept up by the pull of the hypermass; as they fell they built up electrical static which was discharged in almost continuous lightning.  Karlsen saw as blue-white the nearer flashes, those ahead of him as he rode.  But most of the flashes, like most of the clouds, were far below him, and so most of his light was sullen red, wearied by climbing just a section of this gravity cliff.

Karlsen 's little bubble-ship had artificial gravity of its own, and kept turning itself so its deck was down, so Karlsen saw the red light below him through the translucent deck, flaring up between hisspace-booted feet.  He sat in the one massive chair which was fixed in the center of the bubble, and which contained the boat's controls and life-support machinery.  Below the deck were one or two other opaque objects, one of these a small but powerful space-Warping engine.  All else around Karlsen was clear glass, holding in air, holding out radiation, but leaving his eyes and his soul naked to the deeps of space around him.