I said, "Half a turn more, and something snaps. You won't like it." "I--can't." "Why can't you?" "Because--the Kel--won't let me." "They won't let you?" I paused in my twisting to make a slow, elaborate survey of the distorted room. "You know, for a second I almost thought you said the Kel wouldn't let you take me out." "They--won't. Try--to leave. You'll--see--" There was something in her voice that rasped my nerve-ends. Cat-footed, I spun about, looking this way and that. Still nothing. Nothing but a strange, misshapen room and twisted, nonrepresentational statuary. Wordless, I shoved Celeste Stelpa towards the door. Like an echo, something seized me by the ankle. It was a tentacle--a tentacle attached to a weird, pseudopodic body that hadn't been there brief moments before. Frantically, I tried to jerk free. Lightning-fast, off to one side, a distorted lump of sculpture changed shape ... hurtled at me. Floundering and flailing, I went down.... CHAPTER IV THE KINDLY KILLERS "Sometimes you just don't know." Celeste's voice was strangely flat and lifeless in the black. "Sometimes there's nothing you can do but hope and try." I didn't answer. Celeste again: "What would you have had me do, Mark? Let them kill you? That was their first thought, you know; you really did upset them with those things you said about me on the voco. They were afraid you knew so much more than you do." "Forget it," I muttered. "There's no point to going back over it now." "But there is! For me, there is!" For the first time, in this place, my companion's voice showed a flash of animation. "You were the only one who'd pushed them even a little bit off balance. I wanted to know you--to find out what you had that the rest of mankind lacked. If I could do that and save you too, what was the harm in it?" "The harm?" In spite of myself, I roused and glowered through the blackness. "What was the harm, when you urged me to tell you--things--not knowing Kel were there?" "But Mark, I wouldn't have done it if it had mattered! The things you said--those were for me, not them. I knew they couldn't understand them. They haven't any insight into human feelings, human thoughts." "After the thrill-mills, you'd try to make me believe that?" I choked. "They know more about the human mind than man himself!" "No, Mark; they don't!" "The thrill-mills--" "I don't care about the thrill-mills! Maybe someone else developed them. To the Kel, we're only a lower life-form, not worth the bother of that much study. We're laboratory animals, adaptable organisms to use as we'd use rabbits or guinea pigs or hamsters. I know; I've been four years with them, ever since that day on Bejak...."