nd of the act? Another act to come? Something more to
happen? The clock will go round till another time comes. Watch the
clock, the absolutely cuckoo clock, which ticked as things happened that
made almost no sense and yet had sense hidden in their works.

The good old Keku clock. Somewhere is icumen in, lewdly sing Keku. The
Mellon is ripe and climbing Jakob's ladder. And both of them playing
Follow the Leda.

And where were they heading? Toward some destination in the general
direction of the constellation Cygnus. The transformation equations work
fine on an interstellar ship. Would they work on a man? Wouldn't it be
nice to be able to transform yourself into a swan? Cygnus the Swan.

And we'll _all_ play Follow the Leda....

Somewhere in there, Mike the Angel managed to doze off.

* * * * *

He awoke suddenly, and his dream of being a huge black swan vanished,
shattered into nothingness.

This time it had not been a sound that had awakened him. It had been
something else, something more like a cessation of sound. A dying sigh.

He reached out and touched the switch plaque.

Nothing happened.

The room remained dark.

The room was strangely silent. The almost soundless vibration of the
engines was still there, but....

The air conditioners!

The air in the stateroom was unmoving, static. There was none of the
faint breeze of moving air. Something had gone wrong with the low-power
circuits!

Now how the hell could that happen? Not by accident, unless the accident
were a big one. It would take a tremendous amount of coincidence to put
all three of the interacting systems out of order at once. And they all
_had_ to go at once to cut the power from the low-load circuits.

The standard tap and the first and second stand-by taps were no longer
tapping power from the main generators. The intercom was gone, too,
along with the air conditioners, the lights, and half a dozen other
sub-circuits.

Mike the Angel scrambled out of bed and felt for his clothing, wishing
he had something as prosaic as an old-fashioned match, or even a
flame-type cigarette lighter. He found his lighter in his belt pocket as
he pulled on his uniform. He jerked it out and thumbed it. In the utter
darkness, the orange-red glow gave more illumination than he had
supposed. If a man's eyes are adjusted to darkness, he can read print by
the glow of a cigarette, and the lighter's glow was brighter than that.