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babbled and chattered. Voices began to gabble and drone inside his mind, though the world drifted and ebbed dim and silent about him. Who are you are you where do you come from Falk going where going are you I don't know are you a man west going I don't know where the way eyes a man not a man…Waves and echoes and flights of words like sparrows, demands, replies, narrowing, overlapping, lapping, crying, dying away to a gray silence.
    A surface of darkness lay before his eyes. An edge of light lay along it.
    A table; the edge of a table. Lamp-lit, in a dark room.
    He began to see, to feel. He was in a chair, in a dark room, by a long table on which a lamp stood. He was tied into the chair: he could feel the cord cut into the muscles of his chest and arms as he moved a little. Movement: a man sprang into existence at his left, another at his right. They were sitting like him, drawn up to the table. They leaned forward and spoke to each other across him. Their voices sounded as if they came from behind high walls a great way off, and he could not understand the words.
    He shivered with cold. With the sensation of cold he came more closely in touch with the world and began to regain control of his mind. His hearing was clearer, his tongue was loosed. He said something which was meant to be, "What did you do to me?"
    There was no answer, but presently the man on his left stuck his face quite close to Falk's and said loudly, "Why did you come here?"
    Falk heard the words; after a moment he understood them; after another moment he answered. "For refuge. The night."
    "Refuge from what?"
    "Forest. Alone."
    He was more and more penetrated with cold. He managed to get his heavy, clumsy hands up a little, trying to button his shirt. Below the straps that bound him in the chair, just below his breastbone was a little painful spot.
    "Keep your hands down," the man on his right said out of the shadows. "It's more than programming, Argerd, No hypnotic block could stand up to penton that way."
    The one on his left, slab-faced and quick-eyed, a big man, answered in a weak sibilant voice: "You can't say that—what do we know about their tricks? Anyhow, how can you estimate his resistance—what is he? You, Falk, where is this place you came from, Zove's House?"
    "East. I left…" The number would not come to mind. "Fourteen days ago, I think."
    How did they know the name of his House, his name?
    He was getting his wits back now, and did not wonder very long. He had hunted deer with Metock using hypodermic darts, which could make even a scratch-wound a kill. The dart that had felled him, or a later injection when he was helpless, had been some drug which must relax both the learned control and the primitive unconscious block of the telepathic centers of the brain, leaving him open to para-verbal questioning. They had ransacked his mind. At the idea, his feeling of coldness and sickness increased, complicated by helpless outrage. Why this violation? Why did they assume he would lie to them before they even spoke to him?
    "Did you think I was a Shing?" he asked.
    The face of the man on his right, lean, long-haired, bearded, sprang suddenly into the lamplight, the Lips drawn back, and his open hand struck Falk across the mouth, jolting his head back and blinding him a moment with the shock. His ears rang; he tasted blood. There was a second blow and a third. The man kept hissing many times over. "You do not say that name, don't say it, you do not say it, you don't say it—"
    Falk struggled helplessly to defend himself, to get free. The man on his left spoke sharply. Then there was silence for some while.
    "I meant no harm coming here," Falk said at last, as steadily as he could through his anger, pain and fear.
    "All right," said the one on the left, Argerd, "go on and tell your little story. What did you mean in coming here?"
    "To ask for a night's shelter. And ask if there's any trail going west."
    "Why are you going west?"
    "Why do you ask? I