 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 ... Or the old-fashioned child's rocking-chair, the chemistry set—or, most of all, the scrap of gaily printed fabric that, when he picked it up, turned out to be a girl's scanty bathing 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, 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. 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. They were snakelike things which obeyed the orders of his brain as well as your mind can make your toes curl; but they did not touch him directly. Hatcher's principal task at this moment was to run the "probe team" which had McCray under observation, and he was more than a little excited. "Paranormal powers," muttered Hatcher's second in command, and the others mumbled agreement. Their job was to watch McCray, and they would do their job; and even more, not one of them could have looked away to save his life from the spectacle of a creature as odd and, from their point of view, hideously alien as Herrell McCray.
 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.