trite remark he must offer here. "Anything they can do to us won't be half of what we'd feel in ourselves if we did talk."

"Sure," agreed Morrison. "Sure, I see that." But he had agreed too swiftly.

The shock of the light was physical and even the captain cowered away from it and threw a hand across his eyes. There was a clatter and a slither and a tray lay in the middle of the cell, having come from an unseen hand at the bottom of the door.

Morrison squinted at it with a glad grin. There were several little dishes sitting around a big metal cover of the type used to keep food warm. Morrison snatched at the cover and whipped it off. And then, cover still raised, he stared.

On the platter a cat was lying, agony and appeal in its eyes, crucified to a wooden slab with forks through its paws, cockroaches crawling and eating at its skinned side. The cover dropped with a clatter and was then snatched up. The heavy edge of it came down on the skull of the cat, and with a sound between a sigh and a scream it relaxed, dead.

Gray-faced Morrison put the cover back on the dish. The captain looked at the flight officer and tried to keep his attention upon Morrison's reaction and thus avoid the illness which fought upward within him.

The light went out and they could feel each other staring into the dark, could feel each other's thoughts. From the captain came the compulsion to silence; from Morrison, a struggling but unspoken panic.

One sentence ran through Captain de Wolf's mind, over and over. "He is going to break at the first chance he has. He is going to break at the first chance he has. He is going to break at the first chance he has. He is--"

Angrily he broke the chain. How could he tell this man what it would mean. Himself a Point officer, it was hard for him to reach out and understand the reaction of one who had been until recently a civilian pilot. How could he harden in an hour or a day the resolution to loyalty?

It was a step ahead, a tribute to De Wolf's understanding that he realized the difference between them. He knew how carefully belief in service had been built within himself and he knew how vital was that belief. But how could he make Morrison know that fifty thousand Earthmen, his friends, the hope of Earth, might die if the time and plan of the attack were disclosed?

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