thought to why he should be so important to the lobsters, out of the fifty or so people he'd seen in the first cage, may- be two or ten years earlier. It hadn't occurred to him that perhaps the lobsters had stupidly and inefficiently killed most of the rest in their clumsy experimentation, and were getting worried. It seemed a fair guess, though, now that he thought of it.

A different mind than Barton's, he recognized, might have seized upon that possibility and hoped to do some bargaining with it. Barton's mind was stuck on the picture of a mutilated mindless woman forced to die in horrible pain. It was not exactly revenge that held his thinking; it was more on the order of Corrective Annihilation . . .

something like a Roman galley slave with a fixation on the extermination of the Caesars. The idea amused him a little, but not much. Idly he wondered what had become of the easygoing fellow he used to be, and decided that that man had died with the Tilaran woman.

Now, though, he thought he knew his one possible chance for escape. He'd figured it out; the logic was flaw- less. The only problem was that he had no idea whether he could really do it or not.

For a time, then, Barton played an intense and deadly game with the language lessons, a game his would-be teachers could not be equipped to recognize. He would register understanding of one symbol, no comprehen- sion of (he next, confusion about another, in a calculated fashion. Today's knowledge was tomorrow's incompre- hension, he pretended. His idea was to drive the lobsters as nuts as he suspected he was becoming.

It worked for longer than he had expected. The lob- sters took long pauses during the lesson sessions, con- ferred in their tinny little voices, and became so agitated as to reach under their robes and apparently scratch.

Barton didn't see how a lobster could get much of a kick out of scratching itself.

The twitchy one didn't show up again in the window.

That figured.

During the between-lessons periods Barton had been pushing himself as bard and as far as he could manage it, along the lines of heavy self-hypnosis. The drugs were out of his food and air now that he was "cooperating" with the lessons, and he worked that breathing spell for all it was worth. Because there wouldn't be more than one

24.

chance, and while that one might not be worth the effort, what else could he do?

When the creatures in the window got tired of his lack of progress and began jarring him again with floor shocks, Barton knew he had to try it. He gave them a little jelly for their bread with his responses to the remainder of that lesson. When the window turned back into gray wall he curled up in the middle of the floor, well away from the latrine and feeding areas, and began willing himself as close to death as he might possibly get back from, and perhaps a little further. Besides hallucination and self- hypnosis and faking, he threw in considerably more true death wish than he would have done if he were still capa- ble of giving a real damn. He knew what he was doing, but it didn't frighten him. The floor would not allow passage of a living organism; therefore Barton had to be effec- tively dead. That was how he had figured it, what he was betting on. There was no other chance for Barton, none ataIL

The sensation of interpenetrating the floor was dis- turbing beyond anything he could have imagined; he hadn't expected to be able to feel anything. But bis will held; he gave no betraying heartbeat. Some ghost at the back of his mind tried to guess how many pounds of his own excrement he was finally ^following, but the estimate was impossible. He didn't know bow many years it had been, let alone his average excretion.

The sudden drop through the air and subsequent im- pact jarred him. He saw through slit-tight eyelids that he was on the floor of a corridor. At least he had lucked out and missed the plumbing. Only one robed lobster was in sight. It approached, bent over him and reached ...

In two breaths Barton was alive again. He caught a bruise and a laceration across the face before he bad the

" chance to prove his theory that with the proper leverage.

the limbs of an exoskeleton shatter beautifully. When the lobster began to make its characteristic noises, Bar-

' ton kicked the back of its skull in, holding it against the floor and stomping again and again with his bare heel until the thing crumpled.

At that point, like it or not, he had to stop and take stock. His flirtation with near-death had left him weak, and his soul was equally shaken. Barton's vision was flick- ering, around the edges; he waited until it settled down.

25.

Then he stripped the robe from the lobster-creature and looked at the latter with great care. It wasn't all that im- pressive, he decided.

AH right. The thing was outer-shelled for the most part, but not boilerplate with joints. Instead, the surface went gradually from hardshell to gristle where it needed to bend. The shapes of limb segments were not unlike the endoskeletal human, but of course rigid on the outside.

The soles of the feet and palms of hands were the softest and most padded parts of the body. Up the center of the abdomen ran a hand's-width pattern of dots, some con- cave and some convex. The crotch was devoid of any- thing Barton might have expected; it was like a branching tree.

Barton didn't take long, seeing what there was to see;

it took him longer to decide what to do. Not so very long, though. He searched the robe, found a small cutting Im- plement. He carved a great part of the shell off the front and top of the creature's head, pissed in it to wash out most of the brownish blood, and wiped the thing dry with the tail of the robe. Then he put it on his own head. The eyeholes didn't quite fit, so he took it off and gouged them a little larger. He didn't look at what still lay on the floor.

Not yet

Everything inside him said to put on the robe and hood and move out of there, but Barton knew that first he needed something more on his side. He had no real weapon except his ability to break exoskeletal arms and legs, which did not seem quite enough. So, messy hands or not, he took bis dead lobster apart rather thoroughly.

He didn't even throw up.

He learned that the creature's main nerve trunks were ventral rather than dorsal, and down its middle found the bonus of a fine sword-shaped "bone" that needed only- some lobster foot-cartilage to serve as hilt-wrapping.

Barton decided that time was running out. There was no way to hide his gutted lobster in the narrow corridor, so he left it He chose his direction simply: the way he could step least in the juices of the corpse. He kept his "sword" and the other cutting tool under his borrowed robe, out of sight

When Barton met a pair of real live lobsters face to face in one of the corridors, he came close to losing his toilet training. He had no idea what to do. He knew that no one person can stand off an enemy population in its home

26.

territory. So he tried to pretend to be a lobster who didn't want to talk to anybody, and it worked. After that experi- ence he merely kept moving and hoped that nobody would cross him. Nobody did; Barton decided that may- be lobsters were too mean even for other lobsters.

After a time. Barton came to the top of an up-ramp and saw the sky. Now he knew that he had been kept under- ground, for however long it had been. He set out walking, paying no more attention than he could help to the lapse of time since he had last had food or drink.

The sky was spectacular, but Barton couldn't be both- ered. There were stars in the daytime, for instance. Bar- ton couldn't have cared less. He needed a place to sleep.

He found a clump of odd-looking brush and crawled into it, hungry and thirsty and cold,

The lobster that found Barton and poked him with a stick to wake him was a very unlucky lobster. Barton's sword was entangled in his robe, so he bashed its head in with a fist-sized rock. Then, his hunger and weakness overcoming any remaining scruples, he ate the tender flesh of its forearm, raw. It was something like crab meat, and the best-tasting food he'd had since they caught him.

He decided he was beginning to develop a taste for the place. He also decided that he scared himself.

Barton was beginning to believe that he was invinci- ble. When he didn't meet any more lobsters, be was sure of it. He blanked out all idea of how weak and vulnerable he really was, because his mind didn't want to work along those lines. He accepted the knowledge that his halluci- nations were no longer entirely separate from his objec- tive experiences, and hadn't been since he didn't know when. There was something about a woman . . .

While he was gnawing at the last of a lobsterish fore- arm, Barton stumbled onto the outskirts of a field scat- tered with odd-looking vehicles, dully metallic in hue.

Anyone with half sense had to know that a saucerlike ob- ject in such a place would be a spaceship, so Barton sprinted for a saucer.

It was bigger than it had looked from a distance, abouf forty feet in diameter. The bottom surface curved up- ward; the outer edge was inches higher than he could reach and offered no handhold to jump for. He walked around it, looking for access and finding none. Dammit, there had to be a way into the thingi He stood for a mo-

27.

ment, baffled, then began a second and slower circuit, inspecting the surface above him inch by inch.

Ahead, out of sight around the curve of metal. Barton heard a sound of machinery in motion. Carefully he dis- engaged his bone sword from the robe and advanced, to see a curved ramp descending from an area about mid- way between edge and center of the saucer shape. He scuttled forward, to be under and behind it as it touched ground. Then he waited. Somebody certainly was in no hurry. His sword hand was sweaty; he wiped it on his robe and discarded his lobster-mask for better vision.

When Barton heard footsteps above he peeked around the edge of the ramp. One robed lobster was de- scending. Barton waited to see if more would come or if this one would look back and say anything to others in the vehicle. Neither happened; there was only one lobster.

As it stepped off the ramp. the mechanism began to rise, slowly. Barton took three steps forward and swung his sword to belt the lobster across the side of the head as hard as he could. It went down but didn't stay down; it came up facing Barton. Holding the sword hilt in both hands, he lunged to the midsection with his full weight. The thrust bounced off but the creature dropped, holding itself and breathing in ragged gulps. Out of breath himself. Barton let go the sword, turned and jumped to grab the end of the ramp.

The gap was within inches of closing; the thought flashed through his mind that he could lose some fingers.

But with his weight on the ramp, it sank again. He didnt wait; as soon as there was clearance he scrambled on and clambered up as fast as he could manage.

At the top was a door. Barton turned its handle and pushed the door open, wishing he hadn't bad to leave the sword behind. But he found only an empty corridor. A glance below showed that the lobster wasn't having much luck getting up, so Barton didn't wait to see the ramp all the way closed. He found the way to secure the door from inside, and settled for that