"You are too intelligent, too high a type to have been put to work at the machines," came the unspoken thought of the Lassan. "We might better have put you at the controls of one of the fighting machines." (This thought caused a mental image of the giant silver fish he had seen in the hall of the dome to rise in his mind; he pictured himself as seated amid a mass of levers before a panel set with complex gauges.) "It was a mistake," the thought he was receiving went on, "that you were sent there. The Alphen of the mental department, who had your case in charge should have known better. You earth-men make much better machines than the ones we brought with us. You do not even need the helmets in order to control. Some of you are even capable of understanding and operating the lights." (This, he explained afterward appeared not as a consecutive sentence in Sherman's mind, but as a succession of ideas, almost as though he were thinking them himself. With the word "lights" a complex picture presented itself, involving the light-guns and a large amount of other complex apparatus, whose exact uses he did not then or later understand, but which he felt he understood at the moment.) "Now," the Lassan's thought went on, "I don't blame you for being frightened and trying to run away, but you know we are different and I don't quite understand what frightened you. You were working at a machine, were you not?" And as Sherman unconsciously thought of himself sticking his fingers in the apertures of the machines, "I thought so. What happened?" Unbidden, the memory of the explosion came to him. Again he heard the Lassan's step in the corridor, saw the guard move aside, the sputter from the cable, and then the explosion; then his memory jumped to the moment of tugging at the stones with the roar and heat all round and the white-hot stream in pursuit. A vague, but sympathetic thought reached him, followed by a question--"But what made that happen? You're intelligent, you understand these things, you are a mechanic--what made it happen?" With a start of surprise Sherman realized that the Lassan had been leading him gently along from place to place--to trap him! He struggled desperately to keep the thought of the short-circuiting of the guard's helmet from his mind; struggled to think about anything else at all--thought of a plate of steaming corned beef and cabbage, of the multiplication table--5 x 5 = 25, all in neat rows of figures, thought of how to control a plane that had gone into a tail-spin.... The pressure suddenly relaxed, the mind opposite his became friendly again; once more he received the vague intimation of sympathy and understanding, even of admiration of his mental strength.