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then, and screamed; the eye didn't hurt much, but he could feel blood or something worse running down his cheek. He caught the finger, twisted it and could feel it break, but that wasn't much solace. Then the gravity field hit, heavier than he had ever felt it His ribs creaked and he blacked out. When he woke, he was alone again.

The bitch had got at his eye, all right It was mostly healed, which didnt surprise him any more, but there was a wavy line pointing from northwest to southeast in any- thing he saw with his right eye. A wave of despair rolled over him; he felt crippled, mutilated, as though he'd lost an arm or a leg. Barton didn't have much hope for him- self, certainly, but the prospect of a permanent ditch in his vision was more embittering than anything that had happened since his sex had first been turned off.

He couldn't blame the woman too much; he had seen some marks on her that probably would not cause her to view a strange man as a guardian angel. But Barton had the distinct idea that there had to be somebody around who should pay up accounts. He almost got rid of the shock in his comer-sitting hallucinations, but it wouldn't quite go away. After a while he let it alone. Over a time his sight slowly returned to normal, but his feelings didn't.

The second time the dome came. Barton happened to be looking at it. There was the flat floor, and then "pop"

there was the dome. About fifty pulse beats later, it disap- peared, Barton was hard put to describe in his own mind the female creature on the floor, but by comparing some marks he'd seen the first time, he had to admit it was somewhat the same woman who had clawed his eye.

A few minor alterations had been made. The fingers and toes were shorter and scarred at the ends; each end joint with its claw had been lopped off. Half-healed scars ran down the sides of the head at the temples, just forward of the Queen Elizabeth hairline. Barton knew what this might be, but hoped he was wrong. He wasn't; the woman looked up and gave him a blank childlike stare. Then she smiled, and Barton cursed all the lobsters that ever were.

How many teeth had Siewen said-forty? Now, none.

The smiling dull-eyed creature climbed into his lap and hugged him. It took some time before Barton could bring himself to let her kiss him. But she was persistent, and Barton had been alone a very long time.

What was left of the woman had very simple tastes.

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She loved to eat, off the floor with both hands, which was really the most efficient method. She was quite unhouse- broken until the floor conditioned her electrically to use the proper corner most of the time; she cared nothing for cleanliness or appearance.

She was diligently but not urgently homy; after his first lapse Barton fended her off for a time in the interests of what he considered self-respect. But after he once woke to find her straddling him and too late to stop, he gave in and enjoyed it, occasionally. He did keep an eye on the window wall and was prepared to stop at any moment if he saw robed lobsters, but he put out of his mind the possibility that they could watch unseen. After a while he had sex regularly with her, just as though she had been a fully rational intelligent person. After all, she did like it, didnt she?

Sometimes it bothered him that she couldn't talk. Not only his language, but any language. He told himself it wasn't his doing, but the telling didn't help much.

He was so unused to paying heed to her bodily func- tions that he was considerably surprised to realize, even- tually, that she had become not merely fat in the gut but alarmingly advanced in pregnancy. Barton simply had not considered the chance of interspecies fertility. She began to have increasing spasms of ill health; Barton's sex life ceased abruptly. He spent much time trying to make sig- nals to the blank wall that had been a window. There were no answers.

Barton sweat up a storm. He knew he couldn't handle what was going to happen in a little while, that he would have been out of his depth delivering a normal easy birth, with full plumbing and antiseptic facilities. He had none of these and the birth was not at all normal, but very dim- cult. Barton cursed and prayed and got his hands awfully bloody, and the woman-shell was not beyond pain, unfortu- nately. She screamed and cried as pitifully as though she had had her whole mind with her.

At the last of it, when nothing else could help her, he tried to kill her painlessly in a way the Army had taught him. But the lobsters still knew a trick worth two of that:

their gravity gadget. When Barton woke up, it was hard to tell which way he hurt the most. The woman was gone, finally now. and for the last of it he blamed himself.

Barton had given up caring about time passage when

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the room gave him the second woman. This one looked like Earth ancestry, very young, just past puberty. Like Limila's fellow citizen, she was toothless, temple-scarred and one joint short of nails on fingers and toes. Barton staggered over to a corner and threw up, without regard to where the plumbing was supposed to be.

He couldn't ignore her, though, because she too was strongly sex-oriented and kept trying to get to him whether he was awake or asleep. There was no way to beat that kind of dedication. So be introduced the girl to sexual juxtapositions that could not result in pregnancy, and for quite a long time he thought he had the situation whipped.

But one "morning" he woke to find that he couldn't stop the girl from following the example of her predecessor;

she had managed to bring him into a "normal" sex act without waking him until the onrush of climax.

Without thought, with only rage. Barton made one move too quickly to be countered. He swung the hard side of his hand and broke the girl's neck. The gravity field hit him then, and he didn't fight it. All he needed was a time to cry for his dead. But when he woke he felt no grief- only emptiness.

They left him alone for a while, until the beginning of what he recognized as language lessons. When the window began showing sets of visual symbols matched with the first sounds he had heard from outside, he knew what they had in mind. He felt, Barton did, that it was a little late for that crap. He already knew all the important things.

And it might be advisable to deny the lobsters the insight into his own mind that they might gain by observing his learning processes. Each time the lessons began, he faced the opposite wall. He was pretty deeply into self-hypnosis, and thus fairly successful in ignoring the sounds.

They turned off his sex again. He learned to halluci- nate it so well that he didn't really care; in fact, since his mind could experience it more often than his body could, it was in some ways an improvement. More and more he stayed in his own mental world, emerging for feeding and elimination but for very little else.

They worsened the flavor of his food, which took som.

doing. After the shock of the first taste, he ate it and pre- 'tended enjoyment. When they made it completely un- palatable he substituted a hallucinatory taste for the actual one and wondered why he hadn't thought of that answer before. They put stenches in his air also, to no

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avail and for the same reason. One thing was obvious to Barton: he might have been a slow learner, but the lob- sters weren't such great shakes either. He had to hand them one thing, though-at least they were getting his attention, more than he liked.

They played games with the temperature, air pressure and floor gravity. Barton played games right back at them, with his growing abilities of hallucination and self- hypnosis. The only things that really got to him, he noted grimly, were of a type that couldn't possibly gain his cooperation.

The first was dropping the oxygen content of his room;

he couldn't fight that, but it rendered him unconscious.

The second was electrical shocks from the floor; with some effort he could put them on his "Ignore" circuit but the muscle spasms left him sore. And the third, once only and probably due to a loss of temper by some lobster or other, was floating him in the air on zero gravity and sud- denly slamming him to the floor. It broke his right fore- arm. He healed rapidly, of course, but the break was not set. It left him with a lumpy arm, and painful. Barton wondered how that would work with an exoskeleton. He took up a regular exercise program for the first time, so as not to waste a chance to find out, if he ever got one. After a time his physical condition became surprisingly good, even by his own standards. He decided that the food must have been nutritious even though its natural taste was more rancid than not

When Barton's self-propelled hallucinations began getting out of hand, he figured they were experimenting with drugs in his food. He knew with certainty that here was something that could take his high ground away from him. He had to change his tactics, so he decided to watch the lessons. The same drugs that cut into his control of his own mind should also distort his responses and thus any- thing the lobsters could learn from them. So when the window next began to show a language lesson, he sat and watched it. Of course he fiddled in a little hallucinatory content to keep things interesting.

He noted that the impersonal symbol-sound pairings had been replaced by one or more lobsters holding up the symbols and making the sounds, with gestures. He found that he understood a lot of it almost immediately; perhaps some of the earlier material had been getting through on a subliminal basis while he thought he had been ignoring it.

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Since he did not want to learn lobster language he forced himself to ignore as many as possible of the meanings that came intuitively into his mind at each sound-symbol- gesture showing. And after several depictions of a con- cept that he was fairly sure meant "friendship," he stood up and deliberately pissed on the window. His act brought the lesson to an abrupt end. The lobsters conferred with each other in something resembling a state of excite- ment; then two converged on the twitchy one Barton had noticed when the creatures had first shown themselves.

At least it looked like the same twitchy lobster; there might be more than one. If I were a lobster and had me in a cage. Barton thought, I might feel a little twitchy myself.

Then he chalked that thought off to a natural paranoia and watched the outside action more closely.

The three lobsters were coming closer to the window, the twitchy one in the middle, the other two apparently urging it forward. Sure as hell, Barton thought, that one looked different. Not so much like a lobster; the texture was wrong. But the features were about the same, what he could see of them.

Barton had the feeling of almost recognizing the twitcby softer-looking lobster, when it spoke to him.

"Barton 1 For your own good you must-" The lobster face broke into entirely unlobsterlike spasms and the voice went shrill. "No, DON'T;, Let them kill you first! I was once-" And the window turned back to gray wall.

Well. The voice had been in English. The sound quality was distorted abominably, but he'd detected only over- tones of any "lobster accent" There had been a hint of familiarity to that voice, and so far as he knew. Barton had never been on speaking terms with a lobster. But he had the feeling that there was something he should be re- membering.

Then there were new scents in the air and Barton guessed that the lobsters had hit upon breathing-type drugs to bend his mind. Serve the hardshelled bastards right if they killed him first, he thought for a moment, be- fore he passed out cold.

The problem was that any chemical agent in the food or air that broke Barton's will also dispersed his powers of concentration. After all, those were two looks at the same bag of ego, though Barton had not previously considered the matter in those terms. He had not he began to realize, considered a lot of things. For one, he hadn't given much

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