Now he lay in a sort of amphitheatre, it seemed--a bubble joined on all sides by a thousand other, smaller bubbles. Each lesser sphere held one of the Helgae. Fascinated, Boone studied them through the clear walls of his cage; and never did man look on stranger creatures. For their bodies were mottled, shapeless blobs--limbless, with no visible trace of sensory organs. They could as well have been lumps of mud or metal, for all that Boone could see. Perhaps the men at the Titan base had been right. It outraged human reason even to dream that such things could have intelligent, independent life. Only then an alien thought flashed through Boone's mind--a thought without meaning, couched in terms no mammalian brain could ever have defined. Boone groped; floundered. Another thought-tendril reached him, even less translatable than the first. He felt an uneasiness, a twinge almost of conscience, as if this were a thing that duty demanded he should grasp. But effort made no slightest difference. Though he strained till his temples throbbed, the concept remained beyond his powers to understand. Shaking, he gripped his head between his hands. Now the patterns came in dozens, hundreds. Boone's brain reeled under their impact. He staggered, cried out in helpless fury. As swiftly as they had come, the alien intellects withdrew. Weak, drenched with sweat, Boone slumped to the bottom of his sphere. As he did so, the golden glow that bathed him changed to deepest purple. Taut, eyes flickering, Boone watched and waited. Slowly, a new sensation came. This time, there was no alien thought-projection--if, indeed, it had been that which he had felt before. Rather, now, the other minds were probing his own brain-cells--searching his cortex with tendrils a thousand times more delicate than Man's finest nerve-ends; wringing out his thoughts as one might squeeze water from a sponge. There was a laying-bare of dreams dredged from the deep subconscious, a draining off of skills and knowledge. And agony came with it--an agony that rose from soul, not body; a pain that seared beyond all human ken. Through a thousand years it stretched, that pain--a thousand years when seconds lasted eons. Boone writhed and screamed. At least, he thought he did. For never, never, so long as he should live, could he be quite sure. Yet he knew, somehow, that, lacking a universe of discourse, the things the Helgae sought most were still locked in his brain. Like him, they could not bridge the chasm that yawned between such different minds. Then it was over and the glow of purple, too, was fading. The probing minds drew back their tendrils. Boone's sphere dissolved into a place of glorious, delirium-born darkness and he was falling ... falling.... CHAPTER IV