He found himself unaccountably pleased that he had an excuse to stop hating Linna.

He thought about the plan he had in mind until he went to sleep.

It was difficult, in that windowless and practically sound-proof place, to judge the passage of time. To Price it seemed like centuries. He slept, and woke, and ate, and paced around, and fretted between hope and a despairing certainty that Linna had forgotten all about him. He slept again, and was awakened from that sleep by the deep shuddering of the Citadel as a starship either landed or took off. He lay drowsily wondering what it was like to fly one of those mighty craft, traitorously wishing he was a Vurna so he might have a chance to find out, and dreaming of space and stars and foreign worlds.

The Citadel shook again, and yet again, and Price came wide awake. He counted twenty-one, and there was no way of knowing how many landings or take-offs had occurred before he woke, or too far out in the Belt to be noticed here.

Certainly some large movement was underway. He took to pacing again, in a sweat of worry over what this meant, not to the Vurna, but to him.

After what seemed an eternity the door opened and Linna stood there, looking pale and grave. There were no guards with her. She was alone.

"The flier is waiting, Price," she said. "Let's go."

He joined her. And now he saw that the aspect of the corridor had changed. A sliding bulkhead had closed off part of it behind a wall of iron."What's that for?" he asked.

"Our--prisoners," said Linna, as though the word stuck to her tongue.

"Come on."

She seemed in a great hurry to get away from that bulkhead. Price said, "What's the matter, aren't they human, or something?"

She gave him a look. "You still think it's all a great joke."

"I didn't say that."

"You mean it, though. You still believe the Ei are something we made up to shift the blame from ourselves. Probably you believe we are staging this whole matter to impress you and your chief, so that you will go back and assure your tribesmen it is all true."

This was so uncomfortably close to what 

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