He glanced around the bare metal compartment, noting the apparent age of the equipment, and glumly thought: A ghost ship for true.

“All right,” he suddenly barked. His voice sounded flat and unnaturally loud in the close, still confines of the room. “Stop hiding, whoever you are.”

The voice laughed. “Does living alone in space make you so abrupt, Brant? It hasn’t affected me that way. No, I can’t see inside the ship. Only outside. Just space, space, space.” The tones were edged for a moment with a repressed hysteria. “Where am I? Why, right here, all around you.”

Kittinger looked all around himself. “What kind of nonsense is this?” he snorted.

“You still don’t see me? You're standing on me. Or rather, in me. I’m the ship.”

“...But there was method, as they say, in my madness. I am a living space-ship. I’m as immune to a dead space-ship— an IP cruiser, for instance—as you would be to a remote-controlled robot. My reflexes are twice as fast. I feel things directly, not through instruments..."