_I had seen some experimental work with hypnosis and post-hypnotic performance. After the first couple of sentences, I led Teddy into the living-room, and switched on the tape-recorder. I left it on as long as he kept talking. I had to change tapes once, and missed a few more sentences. When he was done, I asked him, with the tape still running, where he had heard that story._ _"What story?" he asked. He looked perfectly normal again._ "_The story you just told me._" _He was obviously puzzled._ "_The_ science-fiction _story_," _I said_. _"I don't know where they got the car," he began; his face was set and his eyes were blank._ _I kept the tape running, and picked up the parts I'd missed before. Then I sent Teddy off to the playroom, and played back the tape, and thought for a while._ _There was a little more, besides what you've read. Parts of it were confused, with some strange words mixed in, and with sentences half-completed, and a feeling of ambivalence or censorship or inhibition of some kind preventing much clarity. Other parts were quite clear. Of these, the only section I have omitted so far that seems to me to belong in the story is this one:--_ * * * * * The baby will have to be born on Earth! They have decided that themselves. And for the first time, I am glad that they cannot communicate with me as perfectly as they do among themselves. I can think some things they do not know about. We are not coming back. I do not think that I will like it on Earth for very long, and I do not know--neither does Larry--what will happen to us when the Security people find us, and we cannot answer their questions. But-- I am a woman now, and I love like a woman. Larry will not be their pet; so I cannot be. I am not sure that I am fit to be what Larry thinks of as a "human being." He says I must learn to be "my own master." I am not at all sure I could do this, if it were necessary, but fortunately, this is one of Larry's areas of semantic confusion. The feminine of _master_ is _mistress_, which has various meanings. Also, there is the distinct possibility, from what Larry says, that we will not, _either_ of us, be allowed even as much liberty as we have here. There is also the matter of gratitude. _They_ brought me up, took care of me, taught me, loved me, gave me a way of life, and a knowledge of myself, infinitely richer than I could ever have had on Earth. Perhaps they even saved my life, healing me when I was quite possibly beyond the power of Earthly medical science to save. But against all this-- _They_ caused the damage to start with. It was _their_ force-field that wrecked the car and killed my parents. _They_ have paid for it; _they_ are paying for it yet. _They_ will continue to pay, for more years than make sense in terms of a human lifetime. _They_ will continue to wander from planet to planet and system to system, because _they_ have broken _their_ own law, and now may never go home.