It was dark--black dark. And he was swinging back and forth through this total darkness. He was a ball, a blast bomb being tossed from hand to hand through the dark by painted warriors who laughed shrilly at his pain, tossed through the dark. Fear such as he had never known, even under the last acceleration pressure of the take-off from Terra, beat through Raf's veins away from his laboring heart. He was helpless in the dark! "Not alone--" the words came out of somewhere, he didn't know whether he heard them, or, in some queer way, felt them. "You are safe--not alone." That brought a measure of comfort. But he was still in the dark, and he was moving--he could not will his hands to move--yet he was moving. He was being carried! The flitter--he was back on the flitter! They were air-borne. But who was piloting? "Captain! Soriki!" he appealed for reassurance. And then was aware that there was no familiar motor hum, none of that pressure of rushing air to which he had been so long accustomed that he missed it only now. "You are safe--" Again that would-be comfort. But Raf tried to move his arms, twist his body, be sure that he rested in the flitter. Then another thought, only vaguely alarming at first, but which grew swiftly to panic proportions--He was in the alien globe--He was a prisoner! "You are safe!" the words beat in his mind. "But where--where?" he felt as if he were screaming that at the full power of his lungs. He must get out of this dark envelope, be free. Free! Free Men--He was Raf Kurbi of the Federation of Free Men, member of the crew of the Spacer _RS 10_. But there had been something else about free men-- Painfully he pulled fragments of pictures out of the past, assembled a jigsaw of wild action. And all of it ended in a blinding flash, blinding! Raf cowered mentally if not physically, as his mind seized upon that last word. The blinding flash, then this depth of darkness. Had he been--? "You are safe." Maybe he was safe, he thought, with an anger born of honest fear, but was he--blind? And where was he? What had happened to him since that moment when the blast bomb had exploded? "I am blind," he spat out, wanting to be told that his fears were only fears and not the truth. "Your eyes are covered," the answer came quickly enough, and for a short space he was comforted until he realized that the reply was not a flat denial of his statement. "Soriki?" he tried again. "Captain? Lablet?" "Your companions"--there was a moment of hesitation, and then came what he was sure was the truth--"have escaped. Their ship took to the air when the Center was invaded." So, he wasn't on the flitter. That was Raf's first reaction. Then, he must still be with the mermen, with the young stranger who claimed to be one of a lost Terran colony. But they couldn't leave him behind! Raf struggled against the power which held him motionless.