During Westward’s last Escherspace jump, six members of the crew eschewed normalization, the process by which the crew’s subconscious minds were used to establish Westward’s location in space and time, for fear that their knowledge of its workings would offset the process itself. But Doctor Faust went a step farther and declined sedation of any kind. He did this because he knew that Viktor Grafeneck, his old colleague for whom he had spent the past half-century searching, had likely traveled through Escherspace in the same condition. The little experiment had results that few would find encouraging. -e