"That's a lie!" snapped Carter. "I came out of my ship to see where you people were, and he hit me from behind." Gendron glanced at him quizzically. "That's hard to believe. Sherman's one of my most reliable men. Lieutenant Carter, I'm inclined to doubt your entire story. Would you mind explaining yourself?" Carter began to feel a growing sense of exasperation. "Look," he said. "I was minding my own business when this SOS came. I'm on leave now; I'm wasting my precious free time fooling with you people. So I picked up your SOS, and I landed. Then this man hit me. That's all I can tell you." "I'm completely at a loss to clarify," said the Squadron Leader. "So far as I know, we sent out no SOS. We're in no danger here. We haven't even begun to complete our work. I'm sorry if we've caused you some inconvenience." Carter shook his head. _Maybe I'm going batty_, he thought. _Maybe that blast aboard the_ Alpha C _juggled my brains as well as cracked my skull. Maybe I didn't hear any SOS after all._ "Okay," he said finally. "I'll go back to my ship and blast off. Forget the whole thing." "That might be the best idea," Gendron agreed. "Would you want Sherman to show you the way?" "I think I can find it myself," Carter said. He turned and headed out of the clearing, trying to convince himself that he still had a little of his sanity left. He moved about three steps. Then something struck him a ringing blow on the back of his head, and he toppled to the ground. * * * * * Carter woke, feeling as if a mountain had fallen on him. His head ached miserably, his eyes wouldn't focus, his tongue felt thick and sand-papery. He tried to move his hands, and discovered that he was securely bound. His arms were strapped together with what looked like leather thongs, and his ankles were tied as well. He was in a dark, windowless room--probably somewhere in the squat building in the clearing. He struggled to get his mind functioning again. All he could think of was the way his head hurt. Gendron had hit him from behind. That seemed to be the rule, on this planet. After denying everything about the SOS, Gendron had clubbed him when he wasn't looking. It didn't figure. And there was that faint tickling in his skull, beside the raw pain of the bruise. He didn't understand that either. Carter sat up against the cold wall of the dark room, and yanked at his bonds. They didn't give. He was trussed like a Christmas turkey--for what? Suddenly, he stopped moving, and listened. Voices. They were speaking in the same cold, metallic tones the spaceman Sherman had used when Carter first landed. "I don't understand it," someone said. "He walked right through the control." "It was peculiar, all right. He came within the sphere of radiation and it didn't have any effect at all. Gendron had to club him or he would have gotten away." "We couldn't have that," the first voice said. "We need all the men we can get for The Project."