"It's all right," he murmured. "I've killed it. It won't move again. Easy now, there's nothing to fear." The woman was shuddering violently and to quiet her he began more firmly to stroke her bare back, running his hands over the velvety smooth skin between her shoulder blades and even more firmly caressing the twin mounds of her breasts. Suddenly she was clinging to him, her arms locked about him so tightly he had difficulty in remembering his only desire was to comfort and reassure her. Or perhaps he did not want to remember. Passion awoke in him, fierce, irresistible. He lowered his head and brought his mouth down hard on lips that seemed to melt beneath the demanding ardor of his kisses. She seemed suddenly unbelievably young to him, eager and vibrant, as if he had met her for the first time. Yet she was his wife, surely, and they had known many such moments of rapture in the past. Or had they? He had the strange feeling that he, too, had been born anew, that he was not quite the same man who had plucked the blooming rose of love many times before. He felt almost like a young boy, clasping his virginal first love in a forest glade and watching her face turn crimson.... "We have seen enough," a cold voice said. "My insight was flawless. They were exposed to danger first--a great and terrible danger. And they were stirred to passion as I was sure they would be. They are only androids, but the proof is strong and convincing enough. I am quite sure now that we will succeed as well with David Loring and the woman of his choice." The android man and woman did not hear the voice. It was too remote and Tragor was not addressing himself to an Earthman. He was speaking to Sull, and they both stood at the door of the laboratory. And then, quite suddenly, the disks on the androids' thighs glowed with a blinding incandescence and they slumped to the floor and lay motionless. EIGHT David Loring only knew at first that the room in which he found himself was enormous. He could see the high walls towering up into shadows, and the great distance which separated wall from wall, shadow from shadow. He saw the room in fitful flashes, between sleeping and waking. He saw it as a prison and a sanctuary, the ward of a hospital, a waiting room at the hub of some intricate and planet-engirdling web of communication. He saw it even as a quite simple, peaceful place, soothing to the eye, where a man could sleep and dream with a beautiful woman at his side, their bodies completely at ease in the dawn light, relaxed and languorous. Finally, after what may have been days, or only hours, he saw the room as it really was. He saw it as a prison on an alien world, and the woman who shared it with him as a captive like himself who had to live with the shattering knowledge that what she saw in his eyes he saw in hers. "Janice," he whispered.