serious face beneath a short-cropped tangle of bright yellow hair. The eyes were troubled. His manner softened instantly.

Trying not to show the sudden warmth he felt, he pointed with offhand authority at the tall metal machine, its face alive with leaping lights and quivering indicator needles.

"This'll tell the story, one way or the other," he said. "A Space Zoologist's chances are always fifty-fifty. He either succeeds and returns in perfect health, or he fails and doesn't return at all. But whatever data he picks up in Contact will be punched onto the microtape. It may help us deal with the menace. Or it may not."

She looked surprised. "Then this is simply a recorder? I'd thought it was the thing that sent his mind out to the mine area...." She faltered on the last few words, and looked more concerned than ever.

The tech was tempted to ask her about it, but decided to stay on the neutral ground of simple mechanics for a while. "No, his mind sends itself. That is, the helmet triggers a certain brain-center; his mind follows a scanner-beam directed toward the alien and he Contacts. After that, this machine could be turned off, so far as maintaining Contact goes. After a forty-minute interim, his mind would return to his body by itself. The brain-center gets triggered sort of like a muscle reacts to a blow. It gets paralyzed for a certain time. Forty minutes. Beyond that limit, or short of it, no Contact or breaking of Contact is possible...."

His voice trailed off as he realized her responsive nods were abstracted and vague, her thoughts elsewhere. "Look," he said awkwardly, "I'm no psyche-man, but—maybe it'd help if you talked about it."

A faint smile touched her mouth. "I didn't realize it showed."

He grinned and shrugged.

"My name's Jana," she said. "Jana Corby." She was trying to ease some of the natural tension between strangers.

"Bob Ryder," said the tech. He stood and waited for her to make the next move.

"My father—" she said, and for the first time, some of the tension behind her eyes flowed over into her voice. "My father was one of the miners. He was on the morning shift. The day the men didn't come home was the day before my wedding."

Bob frowned. "I don't understand."

She blinked at the moisture that had come 

 Prev. P 11/35 next