Smith awakens at Jubal Harshaw’s home after Jill Boardman carries his rigid, nearly lifeless body there. Harshaw’s examination first makes the arrival look like a death scene; the faint heartbeat he discovers, and Jill’s appeal to their bond, reverse that judgment. The moment establishes the bodily discipline behind Smith’s withdrawal and the trust that can reach him when medical intervention cannot.

Arrival as Apparent Death

Harshaw initially attends to Jill, who is exhausted, frightened, and convinced that Smith is not dead, even as she admits she hopes she is right. When Harshaw examines the body, its temperature seems to have fallen to that of the air, and its rigidity is unlike ordinary rigor. He asks how long Smith has been dead, treating the signs before him as evidence of a corpse rather than a patient in an unfamiliar state.

Larry helps Harshaw lift Smith from the back seat and lay him on the grass beside the pool. Smith remains stiff and huddled. Dorcas fetches Harshaw’s stethoscope from the house, switches it on, and raises its gain so that Harshaw can listen. At first, he tells Jill that the case is beyond his help. Her insistence that Smith is still alive does not rest on a conventional diagnosis; she has struggled to get him into the car and refuses to accept the appearance of death as the whole truth.

The Hidden Work of Withdrawal

Smith’s condition has a physiological logic, though it lies outside the ordinary expectations of the people examining him. In an earlier episode, after the strange spatial conditions of his new surroundings have compressed and weakened his body, he takes refuge in the softness of the nest where he has been placed. He turns his attention inward to regulate his breathing and heartbeat, recognizing that his body is consuming itself as it tries to cope with the pressure and the hot, dangerously rich atmosphere.

He reduces his heart rate to twenty beats per minute and makes his breathing almost imperceptible. Before withdrawing his attention, he checks that these functions will continue safely without his supervision, leaving only a small portion of his awareness on guard. The apparent stillness at Harshaw’s home therefore belongs to a wider pattern of withdrawal and disciplined bodily control, not to an ordinary collapse that a familiar stimulant can simply reverse.

The limits of conventional medical interpretation recur in Smith’s story. During the voyage to Earth, a physician describes another episode as atypical shock leading to death. Dr. Nelson dismisses that diagnosis as inadequate to an unprecedented case: he has seen Smith in the same condition repeatedly, and demonstrates the rigidity by lifting the patient’s arm and letting it remain suspended where he leaves it. He uses the word catalepsy only as a label, warning that naming the appearance does not explain it. Harshaw’s discovery at the pool similarly depends on listening rather than assuming that a familiar description settles what has happened.

Jill’s Intervention and Smith’s Return

Harshaw recognizes that his own methods may not be the right first response. Jill tells him she wants only to wake Smith, and that attempts to do things to him make him withdraw more deeply. Harshaw lets her try, with the practical proviso that she use no axe. The scene turns on a contrast between forceful treatment and personal contact: the nurse who has brought Smith this far believes that intervention must begin with gentleness.

Jill kneels beside Smith and carefully tries to straighten his limbs. She succeeds, and Harshaw’s raised eyebrows register his surprise. She cradles Smith’s head in her lap and addresses him as his water brother. Her words call on a relationship of trust rather than offering a clinical command. The appeal is answered physically: Smith’s body stirs, his chest rises very slowly, and a long, bubbling sigh escapes him.

When Smith opens his eyes, he smiles at Jill with the childlike expression the narration associates with him. She smiles back. The smile disappears as he looks around, and Jill immediately tells him that the people present are friends. His first response, asking whether they are all friends, marks the distance between waking into an unfamiliar room and feeling secure within it. Recovery is not a single switch from deathlike stillness to ordinary ease; Jill has to help interpret his surroundings as safe.

Consequences and Significance

The awakening changes the scene’s stakes from whether a corpse can be revived to whether Smith can be met on terms he understands. Harshaw’s medical authority remains present, but he allows Jill to act when she explains that further intervention risks deepening the withdrawal. The crucial action is not a drug or a technical procedure: it is her careful handling of Smith and her reminder of their shared bond. His return makes that relationship a practical means of reaching him, not merely a name for their connection.

The episode also anticipates later encounters with Smith’s unusual body. At Harshaw’s home, Nelson is baffled when he examines Smith and finds muscles that were not there ten days earlier. Smith later reports that he has read several further volumes of the Encyclopedia, along with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Casanova’s memoirs, and a manual on cross-examination, then tried to understand what he had read. These episodes show how quickly familiar measures—diagnosis, physical development, and ordinary learning—can fail to describe his capacities. The awakening introduces that recurring uncertainty in its starkest form: a body that looks dead, a heartbeat almost missed, and a return made possible when Jill recognizes the person inside the apparent stillness.