"Five seconds!" cried the tech. "Four ... three ... two ... one.... Get it, quick!"

Jerry, still within the mind and watching with the same horrified fascination as his host, saw the puff of flame within the flame-tube of the weapon, then saw the insane red flower blossoming with its smoking yellow tendrils toward his face—

And the silent white lightning flared—

And he sat up on the couch, back in the solarium.

Jana hurried over to him.

"Did it work? Did it work, sir?" she cried. "Is Bob—"

Jerry patted her hand. "Bob's all right. He was on time. Just on time."

"I still don't understand, sir," said the nurse, sinking onto the couch beside him without waiting for an invitation. "I don't understand any of this!"

For an instant, Jerry resented this familiarity, then felt slightly overstuffed, and slipped an arm paternally across her slim shoulders.

"I'll explain," he said. "It'll pass the time till he gets back."

Jana nodded.

"The alien," Jerry said softly, "was a mimic. A perfect mimic. It was, while non-intelligent, of an abnormally well developed mind in one function: telepathy. That's how it could carry on apparently intelligent mental conversation with me, during my first contact. It could sense my questions, then probe my mind for the answers I wanted most to hear—and play them back to me. For my forty minutes of contact, it told me only what I wanted to know, like a selective echo. It needed no understanding of my questions, nor of the answers it plucked from my mind. It had one instinct: self-preservation. It could sense my question, select an uncontroversial answer from my mind and feed it back to me, without really understanding how it warded me off as a menace to it, any more than a dog understands why lowering its ears and hanging its head as it whines can fend off the wrath of its master. It works; that's all the creature cares about."

"But how did you know—?" Jana asked.

"I didn't," Jerry replied. "It fooled me completely. Until the Ensign—Bob told me that my full forty minutes in Contact had elapsed, despite my knowledge that the sun and clouds had remained motionless during my Contact. That threw me, I'll admit, for quite a 

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