connected with them.

"You see?" said the Arcturian gently. "This has been building up in you for a long time."

Carlin was stunned. He had known of other men who had got star-sick and had had to drop their work and quit traveling space for a while. Other men—but he'd always laughed contemptuously at them for it.

The psychos might declare that it was perfectly natural for a man to develop a subconscious aversion to space if he crowded his work, but the hard-bitten engineers of Carlin's set believed that a star-sick man was nine times in ten a shirker. And now he himself was told he was star-sick.

"You've got to quit work and stay out of space for a while," the Arcturian therapist told him.

Carlin felt sick at heart. "Then all my work in building up the Algol line will go into young Brewer's hands."

Still, he thought after a moment, it might not be so bad. Working in his line's main offices here on Canopus Two, he could keep in touch. And he would have more time here with Nila.

But the psychotherapist shook his head quite decisively at that.

"No, Mr. Carlin. Your case is too dangerous for that. Your subconscious is twisted into a knot that is going to be hard to untie." He hesitated a moment as though he knew what reaction his next words would provoke. "In fact, there's only one way in which you can be normalized. That's the Earth-treatment."

"Earth-treatment?" Carlin didn't even know what it meant. "You mean, some treatment that has reference to the old planet over on the other side of the galaxy?"

The Arcturian nodded. "Yes, our ancestral planet Earth. Where all our race came from, two thousand years ago. Where you're going back to, for perhaps a year."

Carlin was knocked breathless by that calm statement.

"Me going to Earth for a year? Are you crazy? Why should I go there?"

"Because," the therapist said soberly, "if you don't I'm afraid you won't last another six months as a star-line man."

"But why can't I take a rest right here on Canopus Two?" Carlin demanded heatedly. "Why send me to that moldering, forgotten old planet where there's nothing now but a few historical monuments?"

 Prev. P 3/54 next