Captain Anderson shook his head. "No...." And hearing him, they slowly
recognized that the syllable was not a denial, but an exclamation. For
the darkness was no longer a half-meter deep on the bulkhead. No one had
noticed it, but they suddenly became aware that the almost-square cabin
was now definitely rectangular, with the familiar controls, the
communications wall, and the thwartship partition aft of them forming
three sides to the encroaching fourth.
[Illustration: Nude woman on chess motif.]
Ives rose shaking and round-eyed from his chair. He made an unspellable
animal sound and rushed at the blackness. Paresi leaped for him, but not
fast enough. Ives collided sickeningly against the strange jet surface
and fell. He fell massively, gracelessly, not prone but on wide-spread
knees, with his arms crumpled beneath him and the side of his face on
the deck. He stayed there, quite unconscious, a gross caricature of
worship.
There was a furiously active, silent moment while Paresi turned the fat
man over on his back, ran skilled fingers over his bleeding face, his
chest, back to the carotid area of his neck. "He's all right," said
Paresi, still working; then, as if to keep his mind going with words to
avoid conjecture, he went on didactically, "This is the other fear
reaction. Johnny's was 'flight.' Ives' is 'fight.' The empirical result
is very much the same."
"I thought," said Hoskins dryly, "that fight and flight were survival
reactions."