Then the circlet touched his skin, and everything went black.
Only an instant later, it seemed, he woke and jerked upright, forgetting about the restraining straps.
But the straps were gone.
So were a great many other things.
He was no longer in the med chamber. Instead, clad only in shorts, he lay between beige sheets in a wide and comfortable bed in a room that might have been in Habitat Three. Bright light streamed through an open window that framed a square of vivid blue.
Blue?
He scrambled out of bed and to the window.
Beneath a turquoise sky, hectares of bright-green grass and spiky, blue-green trees stretched farther than any space on the Mayflower II permitted. Impossibly far away, that expanse of vegetation finally ended in a high white wall, overgrown with trailing plants
