"Put me down! Put me down," she cried furiously, kicking, squirming. Vickers paid no more attention to her frantic wriggling than he would have to a kitten. His inner lids were raised and he was staring with a strange fixity at the alien world visible through the walls. "What are you going to do?" Tani gasped. "Are you crazy? You can't walk out of here. The blue door isn't operating. Besides, even if you did get away the Ring would have you framed." "I'm not going back to Luna City," Vickers said tersely. "I'm going outside." "Outside!" "Yes." He started for the reception room. "I don't know where we are. Another world, another dimension, it's all the same. I'll be free of the ISP. I'll find a way out if I have to break through the walls." "But you can't!" she wailed. "The atmosphere outside it! It--it's chlorine!" Vickers felt as if someone had kicked him in the belly. He set Tani on her feet. "How do _you_ know?" "Thorpe showed me. He--he--" she straightened her skirt managing to look flustered--"he's been very friendly." "Where are we?" "In another dimension, I think. The blue door is a--a stasis, Thorpe called it. Don't ask me how they do it. They came through in space suits and built this hermetically-sealed fortress." Vickers was silent. After a moment, he said: "All right, you win. I'll break out your father if it can be done." * * * * * Vickers sat in a chair facing a blank wall; his nictitating lids were raised, the pupils of his eyes like lambent flame. Beyond the wall lay the embassy of the Arab Federation. "What do you see?" demanded Tani in a suppressed voice. Vickers and the girl were in the house of Seth Adda, an ex-senator and a friend of Tani's father. He had been happy to lend Tani his house, which was on the eighth level flush against the Arabian Embassy. Vickers was dressed in a snuff-brown burnoose, the national Arab costume. He said: "There's a sleeping room just beyond the wall. This part of the embassy must be the private quarters of one of the officials. The room opens on a hall. There are six--seven--eight other bedrooms along it. I think it's the harem. There's a swimming pool to the left." "Can you see him?" Tani pleaded. "Yes. But not very plainly. He's in a tiny cell almost in the center of the embassy. There's a guard in front of the door." "Is--is he all right? They haven't hurt him?" Vickers concentrated on the vague outlines of the man lying on his bunk. A thin man, elderly, with hollow cheeks. "So that's Doctor Fralick," he thought, "greatest theoretical physicist since Einstein." He said aloud: "He seems okay." Tani expelled her breath in relief. Vickers looked at her suddenly and saw that tears were running down her cheeks. Involuntarily he started to reach out his hand to comfort her, remembered the repugnance normal humans felt toward him and let his hand drop to his knee.