"Where are you taking me?" she demanded.

"You're our prisoner," Lanny answered.

"The Sacred Triangle will not pay ransom. We volunteered to serve here on the earth; we knew the risks."

Lanny moved toward her. Fearfully she slid away from him until her back was against the gunwale. "Don't touch me!" she begged.

He shrugged and dropped on the deck close to her feet. "When you came out of the Triangle to take care of our sick, you never were repulsed by—"

"Not the normal ones, no."

"Your aversion applies only to me?"

"Don't pretend." She twisted her hands together. "What kind of a—a thing are you?"

Juan Pendillo intervened, "We dragged you aboard rather unceremoniously, Tak Laleen. Let me introduce my sons, Lanny and Gill."

"You're lying. Where did you get the metals to make him?"

Lanny stared at his father. "Is she—has her mind been affected—"

"All this beating around the bush is so foolish." Suddenly she seized Lanny's arm and dug her nails, like claws, into his skin. "But—but it is real! You're not a machine." Her eyes glazed and she fainted again.

By dawn the motor of the barge was missing continuously and the speed had been reduced to a relatively slow forty knots. The sun rose, dispelling the fog, and the wind on the sea became a little warmer. Juan Pendillo tried to pace the tiny deck, flaying his arms to restore the circulation. Tak Laleen, having recovered from her second faint, sat brooding with her uniform clutched tightly over her throat.

Periodically the missionary talked to Pendillo. She asked again and again what they were going to do with her. Either ransom or murder were the only possibilities that occurred to her. That point of view was a fair index to the attitude the Almost-men held toward the survivors on the planet they had conquered. Mankind they considered filthy, illiterate barbarians; the primitive squalor of the prison compounds was their proof.

Lanny understood enough of the religion of the Triangle—that noble abstract of God which the 

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