into a wall. A—damn them, a padded wall!

He regained his feet. Stood still, and raced his eyes about him. There it was—above the cot. A small round, shuttered opening—some sort of two-way communication system. He wondered if they could see him, too. If they could, that part of it worked only one way.

"All right, whoever you are, so you've analyzed me!" He had to direct his sudden anger at something, so he shouted at the shuttered aperture. "Now what...."

There was silence for a tiny eternity, and he could feel them probing, evaluating him, as a human scientist would study a rare species in a cage. The feeling ignited a new anger in him, and made him want to curse the teachings that had conditioned his lifetime of thinking to the belief that Man was more than an animal.

He'd been sold short....

"Damn you! God damn you, what are you going to do to me?"

In a corner of his mind he was aware of a gentle hissing sound, but he did not listen. The fear and terror had to be broken. Make them tell, make them tell....

His muscles grew heavy and his face was feverish with his effort, and his eyes stung. Something ... like roses. But there were no roses on dead planets—

"Earthman, can you still hear?"

"I can hear," Johnny said. It was suddenly easier to talk. Even easier to understand. They had done something....

"We are surprised that your state of shock was not more severe. In the process of analyzing you, we discovered that you were totally unprepared for Space-flight, and therefore—"

"Unprepared? What do you think all those months of physical conditioning were for? Yeah, and all those damned textbooks? You think that barrel I cracked up was built in a Kindergarten class—"

"Space-flight requires but a relative minimum of those things, Earthman. Required most is psychological and philosophical conditioning."

"To what?"

"To all things unreal. Because they are the most real; infinity applies to probability and possibility far more directly than to simple Space and Time. But—are you calm now?" The voice was growing deeper, and seemed almost friendly. Johnny tried his muscles; they weren't paralyzed—he could move easily, and his head was clear. And there was no anger, now. No "shock."

"Go ahead," he said.

"Our examination of you has indicated that your race is a potentially effective one, with a superior survival factor. We feel that, properly instructed and assisted, such a race might be of great value as a friend and ally. In short, we receive you in peace and friendship, Earthman. Will you accept us in like manner?"

Johnny tried to think. Hard thoughts, the way men were supposed to think. What kind of game was it? What were the strings? The angles ... the gimmicks. What did they really want?

His lips were dry and barely moved over his teeth, but the words came easily. "Who says you're a friend?"

"We would have learned as much about you by examining your corpse, Earthman."

So he was alive, and that had to prove something. And it might have been a lot of trouble to keep him that way. The hell of it was you couldn't know ... Anything ... you couldn't know anything when you were tossed into the middle of the impossible. He felt the skin on the back of his neck chill and tighten.

But who held out their hand like this?

Whoever did anything like that?

No.

"We wish to help you, Earthman, and your race. We have observed your kind at close quarters, yet we have never landed among you nor attempted communication because of fear for ourselves. But with proper help, there need be no fear between us. We offer you friendship and progress."

"You keep talking about what we get out of it." Johnny stared upward at the ceiling, got his eyes off the little shuttered aperture. He wished he had a cigarette. "You sound too damned much like a politician."

"Perhaps at this point you should be informed that your ship is