"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language."

It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.

After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.

I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.

Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!

I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.

They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.

The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever.

I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the "morning."

When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.

I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.

I was tied to one of the chairs in the "kitchen." Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.

Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.

"Awake, huh?"

"What have you done, Harry?" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.

"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I 

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