me, and he dumps it overboard as I did. They'll drop food and water for me until I stop picking it up. And presently they'll do the same thing all over again."

Jorgenson glowered. That was his reaction as a person. Then he gestured to the cave around him. There was a pile of dried-out seaweed for sleeping purposes.

"And this?"

"Somebody dug it out," said Ganti without resentment. "To keep busy. Maybe one prisoner only began it. A later one saw it started and worked on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many lives to make this cave."

Jorgenson ground his teeth a second time.

"And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't be wrong! Or because they had a business an official wanted!"

"Or a wife," agreed Ganti. "Here!"

He offered food. Jorgenson ate, scowling. Afterward, near sundown, he went over the island.

It was rock, nothing else. There was a pile of small broken stones from the excavation of the cave. There were the few starveling plants. There was the cordage with which Jorgenson had been lowered. There was the parcel containing food and water. Ganti observed that the plastic went to pieces in a week or so, so it couldn't be used for anything. There was nothing to escape with. Nothing to make anything to escape with.

Even the dried seaweed bed was not comfortable. Jorgenson slept badly and waked with aching muscles. Ganti assured him unemotionally that he'd get used to it.

He did. By the time the copter came to drop food and water again, Jorgenson was physically adjusted to the island. But neither as a business man or as a person could he adjust to hopelessness.

He racked his brains for the most preposterous or faintest hope of deliverance. There were times when as a business man he reproached himself for staying on Thriddar after he became indignant with the way the planet was governed. It was very foolish. But much more often he felt such hatred of the manners and customs of the Thrid—which had put him here—that it seemed that something must somehow be possible if only so he could take revenge.

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