Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana disapprovingly. "Why take it out on Rog?" she asked bluntly. "He didn't ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way things are arranged here." "Thanks, Eudalia," said Tennant. "I think I can defend myself. But she's right, Dana. We're as helpless as--laboratory animals. They have the means to make us do whatever they want." "Rog," said Dana, looking suddenly scared, "I'm sorry I snapped at you. I know it's not your fault. I'm--_changing_." He shook his head. "No, Dana, you're not changing. You're adapting. We all are. We seem to be in a universe of different properties as well as different dimensions. We're adjusting. I can do a thing or two myself that seem absolutely impossible." "Are we really in the fourth dimension?" Dana asked. Of the three of them, she alone had more than a high-school education. "We may be in the eleventh for all I know," he told her. "But I'll settle for the fourth--a fourth dimension in space, if that makes scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't sure of that, though, till we got the radio." "Why haven't they brought more of us through?" Eudalia asked, tamping out ashes in a tray that might have been silver. "I'm not sure," he said thoughtfully. "I think it's hard for them. They have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they haven't brought anyone through--not alive." "Why do they do it--the other way, I mean?" asked Dana. Tennant shrugged. "I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose it's because they're pretty human." "_Human!_" Dana was outraged. "Do you call it human to--" "Hold on," he said. "They pass through their gateway to Earth at considerable danger and, probably, expense of some kind. Some of them don't come back. They kill those of us who put up a fight. Those who don't--or can't--they bring back with them. Live or dead, we're just laboratory specimens." "Maybe," Eudalia conceded doubtfully. Then her eyes blazed. "But the things they do--stuffing people, mounting their heads, keeping them on display in their--their whatever they live in. You call that human, Rog?" "Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?" Tennant asked quietly. "Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab? Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?" "I was," said Olga. "But that's not the same thing." "Of course not," he agreed. "In the one instance, _we're_ the hunters, the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other"--he shrugged--"we're the trophies." * * * * *