I must have made some mistake in revising the controllers--or feedback was stronger than I suspected--for the Va Krul syndrome came back along our lines of contact with explosive force! Desperately I reached for the switch--but my hand froze in midair as an intolerable wave of emotion drove Ven and me together like two pieces of iron with opposite magnetic charge! The last thing I remember was being enveloped in the flaring golden glow of Ven's aura. * * * * * I came to my senses in our living quarters. I was stunned--exhausted--limp and gasping. "Thalassa!" I said weakly, "we've _really_ done it now!" Ven smiled a pale blue radiance at me. "You have become strong, living on this heavy world," she said. "I like it." "But--but!" I sputtered. "It was so--it can't--it couldn't--" "But it did," Ven said softly. "And I'm glad it did." "I don't mean that. What I mean to say was that it was so--" "Unexpected?" "No! So utterly--" "Satisfying?" she asked. "Stop interrupting! It was all of that and more. But what I want to say is that we've violated the prime restriction for space travellers. How could we do it?" "You're forgetting that for some time we have been living upon this emotion-charged world," Ven said. "The steady erosion was more than our conditioning could take. The feedback was merely the last in a whole series of disruptive stimuli. It was the trigger, but our defenses had been weakened long before. Not that I'm sorry," she added quickly. "For weeks I've been wondering what sort of a mate you'd be when this trip was over. I'm not unhappy with the preview." She smiled at me and the whole of our living quarters was filled with a bright tender blue. "The natives," I said worriedly. "We were in contact with them." Ven's aura darkened. "I had forgotten them," she said. "I hope that the feedback wasn't intensified and returned to them. I'd better look." She started for the control room and I followed more slowly. "There's no damage," she said from beneath the helmet. "Edith feels just as I do." I took my helmet and coded Don's pattern on the selector. Peculiar, I thought with vague wonder. Most peculiar. For the first time Donald and I were in true rapport. His mind was slow, lazy, sluggish--even his ambition was sated for the moment. Could it be, I wondered, that we could find agreement through our _emotions_? Was it frustration that drove him? Whatever the block had been it was gone now. This was a true empathic meeting--something far more satisfying than our previous conflict. I relaxed in it, feeling the slow langorous questings of his mind even as he felt mine. There was a sense of brotherhood that transcended differences in race and culture. We were down to basics, on the oldest meeting ground of life.