never seen before--a great, bare bubble-room whose very walls radiated chill white light. Lurching to his feet, he stumbled down from the tumbled earth. Two steps he took. And then, incredibly, he could go no further, for out of nowhere, a new bubble, crystal clear and barely large enough for him to stand erect, had formed around him. He spun about. Like him, Eileen stood in a solitary global prison. Stiff-faced with fear, she gestured to him--helpless, hopeless. He hammered at the shimmering wall in furious frenzy. But to no avail. The casing gave no more than had that of the cell in which he and Eileen had come. His sphere began to move away from Eileen's, then. Like a huge ball it rolled, spinning out in an arc that carried it through some unseen exit that led from the chamber of chill white light. Darkness again. But only briefly, this time. Then, once more, the globe halted. New light came, a warm and golden glow. Again, Boone peered forth. Now he lay in a sort of amphitheatre, it seemed--a bubble joined on all sides by a thousand other, smaller bubbles. Each lesser sphere held one of the Helgae. Fascinated, Boone studied them through the clear walls of his cage; and never did man look on stranger creatures. For their bodies were mottled, shapeless blobs--limbless, with no visible trace of sensory organs. They could as well have been lumps of mud or metal, for all that Boone could see. Perhaps the men at the Titan base had been right. It outraged human reason even to dream that such things could have intelligent, independent life. Only then an alien thought flashed through Boone's mind--a thought without meaning, couched in terms no mammalian brain could ever have defined. Boone groped; floundered. Another thought-tendril reached him, even less translatable than the first. He felt an uneasiness, a twinge almost of conscience, as if this were a thing that duty demanded he should grasp. But effort made no slightest difference. Though he strained till his temples throbbed, the concept remained beyond his powers to understand. Shaking, he gripped his head between his hands. Now the patterns came in dozens, hundreds. Boone's brain reeled under their impact. He staggered, cried out in helpless fury. As swiftly as they had come, the alien intellects withdrew. Weak, drenched with sweat, Boone slumped to the bottom of his sphere. As he did so, the golden glow that bathed him changed to deepest purple. Taut, eyes flickering, Boone watched and waited.Slowly, a new sensation came. This time, there was no alien thought-projection--if, indeed, it had been that which he had felt before. Rather, now, the other minds were probing his own brain-cells--searching his cortex with tendrils a thousand times more delicate than Man's finest nerve-ends; wringing 

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