 What is the purpose of the strange objects in Herrell’s 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. The room was totally dark, and it seemed to be furnished with a collection of hard, sharp, sticky and knobby objects of various shapes and a number of inconvenient sizes. 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. 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 ... They seemed to be made of some sort of hard organic compound, perhaps a sort of plastic or processed cellulose. Areas in it had the appearance of gratings; from them issued the pungent, distasteful halogen odor. Item, wherever he was now, it became, not so much what had happened to him, but what had happened to the ship? Someone was watching Herrell McCray, with the clinical fascination of a biochemist observing the wigglings of paramecia in a new antibiotic—and with the prayerful emotions of a starving, shipwrecked, sailor, watching the inward bobbing drift of a wave-born cask that may contain food.
 To make him feel at home.
 To make him use his senses.  To make him feel at home.  To make him use his space suit.  To make him feel confused.