 What effect does Stage Two have on Herrell?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] His name was Herrell McCray and he was scared. As best he could tell, he was in a sort of room no bigger than a prison cell. 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. It was only a personal quaintness; he had done it a thousand times. 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. He picked himself up, braced against something that smelled dangerously of halogen compounds, and scratched his shoulder, right through his space-tunic, against something that vibrated as he touched it. 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?
 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.