Steve stood up and pounded his head with his fist, trying to knock out the sound of his own thinking. There was something here, something threatening and frightful, and he couldn't understand. He let the thought augmenter idle on, emptily bouncing his own thought about the room in magnetic waves of meaningless content, and peered at the other strange machines. There was one, a cabinet where a person could stand, with buttons like a shower stall. He stepped in, pushed a button and waves of force washed over him, set his body to tingling and shaking with the force of it. But what it was supposed to be doing, he didn't know. Beside it was upended a bottle with a spigot and a paper cup. It looked like water, and without thinking he took the cup, filled it, tasted the "water". It was not water; it tasted like peppermint, like licorice, like mint leaves and whiskey ... like quite a drink, he decided and drank it down. He took another cup, and another. His head suddenly whirled, and he staggered slightly. "Potent stuff to put in a water cooler," he grunted, putting out a hand to steady himself. For the stuff had set up a thrumming in his veins, a pumping in his heart, a rosy pulsation in his vision. If he wasn't drunk, what would you call it? he wondered. He tried a step, another, and after minutes his legs obeyed and he walked out the door. He stopped there, looking back. In this condition he would forget his own name.... He wondered what he had forgotten. Something he had left there.... He eased back, sliding his feet, bent over the augmenter to listen to his thinking. It beat up at him from the orifice like a strong wind in his face. It said, "You're going back, Steve, you are going back, to say goodbye properly to your host, the woman who waits and knits and waits and who wept when you left." Steve decided he was going back. They would bring the fuel when they brought it, or they wouldn't. But somehow right now he had to see that "Vey fanis vu?" female again, to make sure about something that puzzled him. Then his thought reminded him. "You forgot to switch off this thing, that's why you came back in." And he reached down and turned the knob; the pulse of his own strange deeper thought stopped, and he felt suddenly lost and his own mind blank. He moved back, turned, went out the door and heard a silvery laugh down the corridor as he staggered a little, trying to walk down the center of the corridor. "Inhuman things," Steve muttered. "They treat me like I was a kid with no sense, or something," and he went to the elevator, down to the street level, and so along the street, some sense of direction guiding his whirling mind. He knew where he was going. * * * * * One of the driverless wheeled wagons stopped beside him, the machine-voice of it said, "You may ride, I am going your way." Steve climbed on the back of the wagon, grumbling. "How'n hell do you know where I'm going? I don't."