“Don’t worry about a thing.” They held the door for him, and he walked into a small and sybaritically furnished room. The second man said, “Just a few questions. Where are you from?” Ross said simply, “Halsey’s Planet,” and waited. Nothing happened, except that all four men nodded comprehendingly, and the questioner made a mark on a sheet of paper. Ross amplified, “Fifty-three light years away. You know—another star.” “Certainly,” the man said briskly. “Your name?” Ross told him, but with a considerable feeling of deflation. He thought wryly of his own feelings about the longlines and the far stars; he remembered the stir and community excitement that a starship meant back home. Still, Ross told himself. Halsey’s Planet might be just a back eddy in the main currents of civilization. Quite possibly on another world—this one, for instance—travelers from the stars were a commonplace. The field hadn’t seemed overly busy, though; and there was nothing resembling a spaceship. Unless—he thought with a sudden sense of shock—those rusting hulks clumped together at the edge of the field had once been spaceships. But that was hardly likely, he reassured himself. You just don’t let spaceships rust. “Sex?” the man asked, and “Age?” “Education?” “Marital status?” The questions went on for more time than Ross quite understood; and they seemed far from relevant questions for the most part; and some of them were hard questions to answer. “Tau quotient?” for instance; Ross blinked and said, with an edge to his voice: “I don’t know what a tau quotient is.” “Put him down as zero,” one of the men advised, and the interlocutor nodded happily. “Working-with-others rating?” he asked, beaming. Ross said with controlled irritation, “Look, I don’t know anything about these ratings. Will you take me to somebody who can put me in touch with the Franklin Foundation?” The man who was sitting next to him patted him gently on the shoulder. “Just answer the questions,” he said comfortably. “Everything will be all right.” Ross flared, “The hell everything will——” Something with electrified spikes in it hit him on the back of the neck. Ross yelled and ducked away; the man next to him returned a little rod to his pocket. He smiled at Ross. “Don’t feel bad,” he said sympathetically. “Go ahead now, answer the questions.” Ross shook his head dazedly. The pain was already leaving his neck, but he felt nauseated by the suddenness and sharpness of it; he could not remember any pain quite like that in his life. He stood up waveringly and said, “Wait a minute, now——” This time it was the man on the other side, and the pain was about twice as sharp. Ross found himself on the floor, looking up through a haze. The man on his right kept the rod in his hand, and the expression on his face, while in no way angry, was stern. “Bad boy,” he said tenderly. “Why don’t you want to answer the questions?”