Be good and you will be lonesome.
--Mark Twain
I woke up. It was completely dark. For a few seconds I stared up into
the blackness, then turned on my side and tried to go back to sleep.
But in a moment I realized I wasn't in my own bed and remembered that I
was a prisoner.
Fully awake, I sat up. The room, becoming light in a gradual
effulgence, revealed itself as a cube about nine feet on each side,
furnished with two things--a seven-foot couch, covered with a coarse
wool material, and me. There was nothing else. I couldn't trace the
source of the light. I lay down and the light faded; I sat up and it
came on again.
My wristwatch was gone and I had no idea how long it had been since my
capture. I had been marched in silence to the clearing, passing through
four or five of the wall-less rooms. No one had spoken as I was led to
one of the hatches of the spaceship.
I had made various remarks as I was being taken in--such as "What's
going on?" "You can't do this to me," "I've got to get to work,
for pete's sake," and "Listen, will you?"--but my captors weren't
conversation-minded.
I was led up a ramp and into the relatively dim interior of the
spaceship. I had a recollection of narrow corridors and an occasional
notice painted on the wall in some alien script. Then I was pushed
into a cabin and the door closed behind me. My captors stayed outside,
but there was a man in the room, sitting behind a long table in one of
the two big chairs. He was wearing a woolen cloak. He was older than
any of the bright young men I'd seen before, white haired and grave
in expression. He was tossing a ball from hand to hand. It wasn't a
baseball, but I had said, for no reason that I could remember now, "I'm
a Braves fan myself."