Jerry once more had cause to regret the impossibility of Contact within a mind of an intelligent creature. Intelligence equated with impenetrability, so far as Contact went. You could learn of an intelligent race only so much as their words and gestures and behavior cared to let you know. Jerry knew he was in a sea-region, but whether over it, on it, or under it--No. The room, so far as he could see, was windowless. It could mean that the vehicle was carrying its own atmosphere, in order to keep the riders alive, whether the outside surface of the ship were within inimical gases or liquids, or the deadly nothingness between planets. Then again, he might simply be within a fortress, or below sea-level in a ship. Jerry gave it up, and concentrated on himself, and his barred container. * * * * * The cage was as high as one-fourth the height of any of the men before it, so Jerry reckoned his own size as about one-sixth. If they were all six-footers, then he must be about rabbit-sized. He glanced down his body and saw hard gray scales over a curving belly, with a pair of hind feet that seemed to be all phalanges and no metatarsals. From "heel" to foot-tip, Jerry had three long, hard-looking black spikes. "Something like a swan's foot with the webbing removed," he mused. A look at his forepaws before his face showed him three similar phalanges, though only two-thirds the length of the hind ones, and having in addition a sort of stubby rudimentary thumb. His forearms were scaly, too, and possessed a wicked spur of the same black material jutting downward from the elbow. Happily, three sides of his cage were polished metal walls, so he was able to get an inkling of his facial characteristics in the warped uncertain mirror of the surfaces. He saw startled-looking eyes, round as quarters, with red irises that dilated greatly with each tilt of his head toward the shadowy rear of the cage, and narrowed the orifice about the pupil to a pinprick when he turned near the front. He seemed to be noseless, also. When he tried to sniff, nothing happened. The attempt made his head feel stuffed up, but he knew that the feeling was only inside his mind, and not an actual sensation. Jerry looked at his mouth. It was just a wide slit in his round, earless head--no, not earless; there were auricular holes under a flange of gray scale--just a wide slit with a glint of sharp-pointed bright orange teeth. "Well," he thought, "I'm at least a carnivore, possibly an omnivore, with teeth like that. The light in this room is apparently not intolerable to those fur-faces out there. So--if the slight shooting pains in my head plus the shutting of the irises when I face into the room are any criteria--I must be a nocturnal beast of some kind. Eyes like this would be blinded by sunlight."