Desperately, the visitor fought to control the flow of Mersey's words. He had opened the gate to the other world--how, he did not know--and all of his knowledge and memories now were Mersey's. But the traveler could not communicate with the disordered mind. He could only communicate through it, and then involuntarily. If he could escape the mind ... but he could not escape. Mersey's eyes were fixed on the ceiling. He would not look at the doctor. "A dying world," Mersey said. "It will live on after us, but we will die because we have finished. There's nothing more to do. The Change is upon us, and we must flee it or die. I have been sent here as a last hope, as an emissary to learn if this world is the answer. I have traveled among you and I have found good things. Your world is much like ours, physically, but it has not grown as fast or as far as ours, and we would be happy here, among you, if we could control." * * * * * The words from Mersey's throat had come falteringly at first, but now they were strong, although the tone was flat and expressionless. The words went on: "But we can't control. I've tried and failed. At best we can co-exist, as observers and vicarious participants, but we must surrender choice. Is that to be our destiny--to live on, but to be denied all except contemplation--to live on as guests among you, accepting your ways and sharing them, but with no power to change them?" The traveler shouted at Mersey's mind in soundless fury: "Shut up! Shut up!" Mersey stopped talking. "Go on," said the doctor softly. "This is very interesting." "Shut up!" said the traveler voicelessly, yet with frantic urgency. The madman was silent. His body was perfectly still, except for his calm breathing. The visitor gazed through his eyes in the only possible direction--up at the ceiling. He tried another command. "Look at the doctor." With that glance, the visitor told himself, he would flee the crazed mind and enter the doctor's. There he would learn what the psychiatrist thought of his patient's strange soliloquy--whether he believed it, or any part of it. He prayed that the doctor was evaluating it as the intricate raving of delusion. * * * * * Slowly, Mersey turned his head. Through his eyes, the visitor saw the faded green carpet, the doctor's dull-black shoes, his socks, the legs of his trousers. Mersey's glance hovered there, around the doctor's knees. The visitor forced it higher, past the belt around a tidy waist, along the buttons of the opened vest to the white collar, and finally to the kindly eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. Again he had commanded this human being and had been obeyed. The traveler braced himself for the leap from the tortured mind to the sane one. But his gaze continued to be that of Mersey. The gray eyes of the doctor were on his patient. Intelligence and kindness were in those eyes, but the visitor could read nothing else.