seconds.

"Just try to equate that!"

He stopped, pondering, and we didn't interrupt.

"Look," he said, "you two go upstairs. Take opposite sides of the house and find him. Go slowly so that he won't be alarmed. Try to talk with him, to persuade him we mean him no harm. If you find you can't persuade him to come willingly, try to work him back to the passenger shaft. I'll watch through the console—I've kinescopes in every room—and I'll lock off one room at a time so that he can't reverse himself. I won't activate the kinescopes until you're upstairs; he might deactivate them if he weren't kept busy. Get him back to the passenger shaft and I'll take over from there."

"But what—" Fitzgerald started.

Browne scowled and we went. Fitzgerald should have known better; there are no buts when Browne gives orders.

We reached the second floor, floated off the up column into the foyer, and separated.

Browne's first floor rooms are spacious, but most of those on the second floor are not. I'd never been on the second floor before; I found it a honeycomb of interconnected rooms of varying sizes and shapes. I was apparently in Mrs. Browne's quarters; there were half a dozen hobby rooms alone: a sewing room, a painting room, a sculpture room, a writing room, others—And here was her spacious bedroom and on its far side the alien was vainly trying to force one of its windows.

He turned as I entered, his curious eyes darting around for an avenue of escape.

"Now, wait," I said as soothingly as I could. "We don't mean any harm. I think we're justified in being curious as to why you're here. Who are you anyway? What are you looking for and why?"

He shook his head as if bewildered and seemed suddenly to become unsteady.

"One question at a time, please," he said, temporizingly. "Your school system isn't exacting enough; you all think of too many things at once. It shocks a mind trained to single subject concentration, especially when one has been educated in telepathic reception."

He grinned at me as I mentally recalled his staggering moments of seeming drunkenness.

One question at a time, he'd said. Well, I'd ask him the one that was burning at the threshold of my mind. I said quickly:

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