Roger Diment felt a band of pressure round his eyes and reckoned hazily that his chaplet must have slipped.
He tried to push it back on his broad forehead and found that his hands moved together for a few centimetres and then stopped. They were, taped that way. Also his legs at knee and ankle.
Sensors beating back to full strength sent in a whole sheaf of data that threatened to turn his mind in stumbling retreat to the limbo it had just now left.
But Diment had not been a top athlete for nothing. He forced himself to a deep-breathing session and worked doggedly at the clues he had. For a start, he was lying on his left side with his knees drawn up almost to his chest, naked as any needle and all set for urn burial.
Secondly, he was cold. He was lying on a smooth metal tray that was doing a good job of spreading his thermal agitation to all parts, and that inexorable Second Law was against his gathering any of it back.
Thirdly, there was a movement of air across his cold skin, and even as he registered it as a fact, he knew that he was the moving object. There was enough to give a confident sitrep. He was hogtied on a conveyor. Now he knew what it was all about and was almost stunned by despair.
He had known it would come in his thirtieth year. Everyone had that much foreknowledge. But he did not know when. He was one of the early ones, in the first monthly batch, then. That was the unexpected thing.
Probably right to the end of the year, the Wayfarer age, group did not believe it would happen to them in spite of annual clearance. Next year's Wayfarers would be the same. God, this time last year he had not given it a thought.
Still, this was a poor way to go. Did it always happen or was he unfortunate or just drug-resistant?
Unfortunate? What kind of word was that? It was unfortunate to be dead or unconscious. To be conscious even of discomfort was pure gain. Using all his strength and nearly dislocating his neck, he got his hands to the bandage and managed to pull it down.
It stabilized over his mouth, but he could not make the effort again. Anyway there was nothing to say. At least he could see that he was not alone.
The conveyor was moving very slowly through a dimly lit conduit with a gentle downward slope. Straining up against his thongs, he could look up the line to a succession of pale mounds following him on his journey, still as plastic lay figures. Nobody else was making a thing about it.
How had it been done? For a short count curiosity, evolution's handmaid, diverted his mind from the present to what had happened.
It had been the first of the continuous round of parties which the Wayfarer age group held throughout their last year. Staged in the biggest pleasure dome on the offshore island of Xanadu, it had played a tattoo on every exquisite square of sense. Any more unconfined and Joy would have split down the middle.
Diment remembered arriving at the quay in his cabin cruiser, perfumes blowing about and the isle full of noises.
The conveyor gave a small jolt and a ripple went away in the distance, sheep over an imaginary stile. Of course they would bring the bodies back for disposal. There would be a tunnel to connect with the converter. He was shortly due to donate his eighty kilograms of well-coordinated flesh to the public use, organ bank, blood pool, a handful of useful chemicals, soap even. He might finish his earthly run as a lather in some girl's bubble bath.
Facing it squarely, he reckoned he was worth more than that. He jack-knifed round until he could get purchase with his feet against the thick beading which edged the conveyor belt. Then he began to straighten out until he felt that he would rupture every muscular wall in his body sack.
Something had to go. It was the loop that bound his hands to a shackle on the deck. The resultant of all the forces shot him at an angle off the disassembly line like any flying Gandharvas.
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