 What effect does Stage Two have on Herrell?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1963. Whatever it was, he had no business in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. McCray was ship's navigator, plotting course corrections—not that there were any, ever; but the reason there were none was that the check-sightings were made every hour of the long flight. He had read off the azimuth angles from the computer sights, automatically locked on their beacon stars, and found them correct; then out of long habit confirmed the locking mechanism visually. And while he was looking at Betelgeuse, Rigel and Saiph ... it happened. McCray tripped over something that rocked under his feet and fell against something that clattered hollowly. No. Not quite utter silence. There simply was no way for him to get from a warm, bright navigator's cubicle on Starship Jodrell Bank to this damned, dark, dismal hole of a place where everything was out to hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. A spacesuit, yes; he knew that he could construct a logical explanation for that with no trouble—maybe a subspace meteorite striking the Jodrell Bank , an explosion, himself knocked out, brought here in a suit ... well, it was an explanation with more holes than fabric, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational. How to explain a set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? They were not metal or plaster or knotty pine; they were not papered, painted or overlaid with stucco. They were "neutral"—the color of aged driftwood or unbleached cloth. Areas in it had the appearance of gratings; from them issued the pungent, distasteful halogen odor. They might be ventilators, he thought; but if so the air they brought in was worse than what he already had. Item, a short time ago—subjectively it seemed to be minutes—he had been aboard the Jodrell Bank with nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting one of the female passengers for coffee. The thought had somehow refreshed him, like icewater between rounds, and with a clearing head he remembered what a spacesuit was good for. He pressed the unsealing tabs, slipped his hand into the vacant chest of the suit and pulled out the hand mike. This was ultrawave radio, something more than a million times faster than light, with a range measured, at least, in hundreds of light-years.
 It distresses him to the point of breaking out of the cell.
 It distresses him to the point of leaving the cell in order to find the woman.  It distresses him to the point of risking what wearing the space suit will do to him.  It distresses him to the point of breaking out of the cell.  The woman’s distress inspires him to break out of the cell.