tied up?" Dollard demanded.

"A temporary precaution," Shir K'han replied, soothingly. The growl of his voice had now reduced itself to a monotonous purr, which reminded Dollard of nothing so much as a ... but then, he shook his head: No! that couldn't be. Mankind replaced by a thinking species of biped felines—descended from a race of giant jungle cats. The development was fantastic.

"Precaution?" Dollard repeated.

"You might have become violent, primate. Only a few anthropoids are extant, now. And They are scraggly skulkers, hiding out in the brush of the second planet—the world you knew as Venus. But even so, many of them have been known to react quite viciously when captured."

"Then, there are humans left?"

"I see you recognize the difference between our race and yours at once." Shir K'han stiffened with pride. "The gap is quite great."

Dollard noticed a very faint striped pattern could be traced in the fuzzy growth on Shir K'han's bared arms.

"Yes, some members of the previous culture do survive," the feline continued. "Puny specimens. We have been forced to hunt them down. Unfortunately, they breed slowly."

"I claim no kinship with them," said Dollard. "If you're sniffing around in an effort to find out my sentiments about that, you can stop right now. As a man from the past, I'm strictly for myself." He winked. "What's more, I never did believe that monkey business. You know, about the human race being the only kind of life having souls or intelligence."

"Strange words ... from a primate."

"That's what I say. You look good enough to me. You have an adequate IQ—that's the only test you need to pass with me. Now, how about getting these clamps off of me?"

Dollard's renewed request incited no action. The feline interpreter's pointed features were impassive; only the pricked attitude of his tufted ears indicated he was listening.

"Let's go," Dollard cajoled. "You've revived me—and I think I've proved I'm not dangerous."

"You still do not seem to understand. Your animation from the frozen sleep was undertaken solely because it was a challenge to our science that we could not over-look."

"And a bang-up job you did of it. Followed my directions perfectly."

"We used our own methods," Shir K'han corrected.

"The idea was mine."

"True, but had you known it, there did exist a mathematical solution to your problem of escaping from the fixed orbit your ship adopted. Apparently, to your misfortune, your training failed to include a knowledge of five-body equations ... so you never arrived at the proper heading you needed to take."

"Naturally, not," the revived industrialist snapped in answer. "But that couldn't be helped. I never professed to be a super-competent astrogator. In my world, in my time, I was a leader of my race—a builder of factories and machines."

"Our archeologists have dug into the ruins of your civilization—without, however, a great deal of curiosity," said Shir K'han coldly. "We found little in it to interest us. We have translated your language—but even so, we uncovered nothing to equal even the barest rudiments of our own science. Our zoologists dismiss you as extra-clever primates—possessed of some knacks, but nowhere on a reasoning, perspicuous level."

"But that's absurd—"

"From our point of view, no. In fact, we still debate whether you primates could have been intelligent enough to have founded your culture without the aid of some early Tegurians. We Tegurians have been superior to the anthropoids as far back as our own history goes, which is to the days of the Great Impetus—the epoch when our race was gifted with great powers and the primates degenerated."

"Nonsense," scoffed Edwin Dollard. "Get me off this sadistic table—and I'll demonstrate how smart I am." He squinted, studying the feline's high-domed head and furry chin.

"Now, I've got you pegged," he went on. "You're just a specimen of what a jacked-up tiger would turn out to be, burned under a few million volts of hard radiation. You may be civilized, you and your people—but I bet it took you a million years of high-speed evolution to do it. If it hadn't been for mankind's work with mutable bacteria, you'd still be chasing your tails under the palm trees—"