"There she goes over to the robot pilot. If you're coming with me you'll have to stretch a leg." Without another word, he plunged off down the corridor. A peculiar whine began to make itself heard. It was so high it hurt his ears. The atmosphere within the ship was growing foggy. A yellow-tinged mist eddied sluggishly like ink discoloring a glass of water. He reached the engine room. There he halted so abruptly that Nadia pitched against him. The engine room was deserted. But the strange door in the aft bulkhead stood open. "What is it?" Nadia whispered. "Don't know." He blinked his eyes, trying to pierce the gathering yellow fog. He caught a glimpse of a bank of switches, the base of a spherical tube, big as man. Then Villanowski passed across the opening from left to right. Gavin began to creep toward the door. Halfway there a blinding flash stabbed at the base of his skull. He swayed dizzily, thought, "Nadia!" Half drawing his dart-gun, he turned laboriously around. But the girl lay stretched on the deck, her long black lashes fluttering. Gavin paused, tried to turn back to the door. It was like moving through syrup. A second flash burst in his brain. He pitched to the deck. "Nine years!" said a man's stifled voice. It reached Gavin, vaguely distorted like an image through wavy glass. "My orbit, it's been nine years!" Through the open window came a wailing chant of imported black laborers from Terra. "But I didn't do it. You can't take me back now." The man's face was sweating and yellow-white. His fingers twitched. He spread them nervously on the desk top. "I'm proscribed. Jordon was a stockholder in Amalgamated Plastic. They'll kill me! Even in the Lunar Corrective Colony, they'll kill me." "Sorry." The cold unfeeling tone of his own voice shocked Gavin. "But it's been nine years," the man persisted as if the time meant anything. Gavin had been sent out by the T.I.S. to get him. Twenty years wouldn't have made any difference. "Even if I was guilty, I've proved I don't need corrective psychiatry. I'm not an incorrigible." "Look," Gavin interrupted. "I've got a job. I don't know whether you're guilty or not and I don't care. I don't even blame you for killing Jordon, if you did...." Gavin's sense of strangeness increased. This had all happened once before during his first year in the T.I.S. This man had been accused of murdering a minor official of Amalgamated Plastic and had fled. After nine years the T.I.S. had learned that he was at a remote trading post on Ganymede. Gavin had been sent to fetch him back for trial. Only Gavin wasn't dreaming all this now. He was re-living it! He was inside himself, yet outside, judging, appraising his own actions with the detachment of an impersonal observer. "I can make you rich. Millions of credits." The man's voice became low, wheedling. "There's a deposit of pitchblende back in the hills. It's fabulous...."