There were a lot of doors, and presumably compart- ments behind them. Barton ignored these and stayed on the main corridor. A little later, in a closed windowless room that he also locked from inside, he looked at the control assembly and wondered if it made any sense.

There had to be a way to find out, if he could think of it. For starters, there was a projecting lever that swung

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smoothly in every direction, to no effect. And another that moved only up and down, but nothing happened there either. And a neat rectangle of what seemed to be toggle switches, with one larger turquoise-handled one in the center. Starting at top left and working to the right, like reading an English-language book. Barton gingerly flipped each of the smaller toggle switches up and imme- diately back down, to see if by momentary activation he could get some clues without necessarily killing himself.

Nothing happened. OK, Barton said to Barton. The swivel bar has to steer this thing, and the up-and-downer has to be the go pedal. Or else I am already dead and just don't know it yet. And these other flips are auxiliary con- trols. So the big blue devil in the middle has to be where the action starts.

Checking to see that all the toggles were back where he'd started, and the two levers also as near to neutral as he could tell, he flipped the turquoise switch. There came a heavy pervasive hum all around him, then a thia scream- ing from somewhere else in the place. The scream wasn't steady like the hum; without thinking. Barton left the controls and went looking for it. on the run.

It was a smaller-than-average lobster, about three- quarter scale. Barton caught it trying to unlock the door to outside. Every impulse shrieked at him to kill it, but even now he had a soft spot for small* presumably young crea- tures, so he tried to subdue it instead. Paradoxically, his weakness prevented him from doing so without injuring it-in the struggle he accidentally broke one of its arms.

He dragged it back to the control area, and using its own robes, tied it down into a seat Still it screamed.

The high piercing sound didn't help Barton's concen- tration. His sight was flickering again, like an out-of-tune TV set with the picture jiggling to the peaks of the sound track. His ears filled the silences with a dull ringing and once a voice spoke in his head: "Give it up. Barton. You lost." When the control panel began to change into a gray wall he fought himself back from past the brink of panic and proceeded to reason with the small screaming lobster in the only way he could manage.

He persuaded it to stop screaming, and then to stop a kind of whimpering, by giving it a full open-hand slap across the eyes every time it made a noise. After a while it got the point. Barton was glad, because his hand was get- ting as sore as his sensibilities. So was his throat; he had

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accompanied every slap with a shout. He was parched thirsty.

His spaceship was still humming. Barton tried his ten- tative steering and throttle levers but nothing happened.

Well, then; back to the rectangle of toggles.

The first few, as he flipped them quickly on and off, did nothing spectacular. The one at the right end of the top row made the whole machine push up at him gendy. He flipped it full on, then. and realized the thing had to be airborne. Flying by the seat of his pants, he worked his self-designated throttle and steering levers gingerly, and found that indeed they gave the feelings of acceleration and turning that he had expected. So he went straight up.

the best way he knew to keep from hitting anything while he figured things better.

The only trouble was, he still couldn't see out. Also the little lobster was keening again, and he couldn't spare a hand to slap it.

Suddenly Barton was standing under a great golden dome, with deep tones of organ music reverberating around him. He shook his head; this was no time to play around with hallucinations, even pleasant ones. It was hard to get back. He had spent a lot of time perfecting that mental escape from the lobsters' cage, he was beat all out of shape, and the miniature Demu's noise was disrupt- ing his thought patterns badly. He wasn't used to noise, dammit!

But he made it, and instead of slapping his small lob- ster to shut it up he took a deep breath, bracing himself, and hit them both with a heavy-G vertical swerve. It did the job; he had silence. Then he went back to the methodi- cal quick testing of the bank of switches.

He was a long time finding the one that gave him an outside view, and somewhat longer in learning that the toggle switches also twisted to give fine controls such as focus or magnification. It was then that he found he hadn't captured a spaceship after all.

It was nothing but some kind of goddamned air car.

There were quite a few more of the same, hanging with him and surrounding him. Barton didn't quite panic, but he did try to make a run for it. It didn't work; they stayed right with him. His mind had not quite decided to run away from home and leave him to manage by himself when he noticed that neither his nor the other airborne vehicles could approach each other too closely; some

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invisible cushion kept them apart. Barton the ex-

physidst thought briefly on the possible ways of obtaining such an effect; then Barton the escaped caged animal took over, wanting only to escape what came at him, or smash it if necessary. He explained the position to his captive lobster several times, but it did not answer, hav- ing learned that noise would cause it to be hit, by Barton.

It did get up the nerve to say "Whnee," quietly.'Barton took this well; he smiled and did not slap the smallish lobster. The exchange might eventually have developed into the first conversation between Barton and a Demu, if he had had the time for it. But of course he didn't.

Barton, though, was only stretched out of shape, not out of commission. He went back to testing the switches that he'd merely flicked before to see that they wouldn't kill him; now he left each one on long enough to see what it controlled. So sooner or later he had to turn on the visual and voice intercom, through which the opposition appeared to have been trying to reach him for quite some time. It was the third switch from the right in the fourth row from the top.

The big lobster in the foreground of the viewscreen broke into excited gestures and loud shrill sounds, so Barton knew the view was two-way. The smaller lobster beside him shrilled back in answer. It was all too loud and too fast for him to follow, but finally it struck him that they were exchanging communication he didn't under- stand.

He could not allow them to talk over his head. That way led back to the cage. Bracing himself so as not to move the controls accidentally. Barton belted the small lobster across the eyes as hard as he could, backhand. It felt like hitting a rock; he hoped he hadn't broken his hand. The creature slumped limply; brownish fluid dripped from one nostril-hole and a comer of its mouth.

Barton felt remorse, but only briefly; he didn't have time for it.

The big one on the screen was yammering again; Bar- ton couldn't follow the text. He shook his head impa- tiently. He knew it was his own stupid fault for not going along better with the language lessons, but he didn't feel like admitting any blame. "You want to talk with ME, you lobster-shelled bastard, you talk MY language!" he shouted. "TALK ENGLISH, or go to hell!"

He repeated this with variations while with half his

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mind he jockeyed the air car against the attempts of his escort to herd him in the direction of their choice. The other air cars surrounded him and tried to mass their pressure shields to move Barton the way they wanted him to go, but there weren't enough to hold him and push him at the same time. And he was feeling just stubborn enough to fight anything they wanted him to do: anything at all.

Hallucinations nibbled at him, but now he decided they must be effects of the Demu unconsciousness weapon.

leaking past the air car's shields. The hypothesis, true or not, made it surprisingly easier to fight the phantoms off, So with something like enjoyment he used his consider- able kinesthetic skills to thwart their efforts to herd bua.

The upshot was that the dozen or so air cars danced around much the same area for quite a while before the next development on the viewscreen. Which was that it spoke his name.

"Barton!" it said. "Thish ish Shiewen. You musht IJshen to me!" On the screen was what Barton had come to think of as the twitchy lobster, the one that didn't look quite like the rest. It sounded like a voice he knew, and now he remembered Doktor Siewen. But why would Siewen sound like a comic drunk act?

Barton put the odd pronunciation to the back of his mind and concentrated on the meaning. "Doctor Siewen? I don't believe it. Throw that damn hood back and let me see you." It seemed strange to be talking with anyone, anyone at alL

As the hands came up and the hood went back. Barton heard a ghost voice: Doktor Siewen's. "They catch peo- ple and turn them into Demu*"

They sure as hell did. Without the hair and ears and nose and eyebrows, with the serrated-lips over toothless gums and a shortened stumpy tongue, the thing on the screen didn't look much like Siewen except for the ctffn and cheekbones. But the skull and neck were human- shaped, not lobsterish. The eyelids looked a little odd;

Barton decided they'd been trimmed back to get rid of the eyelashes. And a long-forgotten memory reminded him that the sounds of s and z cannot be made without touch- ing the tongue to teeth or gums at the front of the mouth;

otherwise the result is sh and zh. He put that answer in cold storage, too, trying to absorb the shock.

It wasn't that the creature on the screen was so horrible

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in itself; when you've seen one lobster you've seen them all. The obscenity was in knowing what it had been before the Demu had set to work. Barton had thought he hated the lobsters already; he found he hadn't even begun.

"All right; it's you, I guess," he said. "I'm listening; go ahead." Idly he noticed the hands with three fingers and no nails; the jog at the wristime showed that the little fin- ger had been stripped away, all along the palm. He -bet himself a few dead lobsters on the condition of Siewen's feet, then shook his head and listened.

"Barton, you musht come back." Barton's mind, back where he wasn't paying too much attention to it, was irri- tated by the distraction of the distorted sibilants and de- cided to ignore them. "The young Demu you have is the egg-child of the Director of this research station. Shut off your shield; it is two up and three over from bottom left of your switch panel. The Director offers you full Demu citizen rights."

Barton chuckled; sometimes you draw a good card.

"Well now. is that right?" Not waiting for an answer be- cause he didn't need one, he went on: "Forget what the Director wants. Forget what the Director offers. If the Director wants his gimpy-arm egg-child back in mostly one piece, the important thing is what / want. And for starters, I don't need any company around here. Get this bunch of sheepdogs off my back; I won't talk any more until you do. And get that damned sleep-gadget off my mind, too. I'll wait." By God, but it was good to be able to talk back for a change, to have a little bit of personal say- so. He waited, not too impatiently.