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corridors and through swinging doors till he halted before another door like that through which they had started. He indicated that Joe should precede him.
    Joe reached for the handle, pressed it, slid the door back and hurled himself backwards into the corridor, gasping.
    The room beyond the door had no floor. It seemed to drop like an elevator shaft, sixty or seventy feet straight down into a kind of bluish twilight. Joe lashed out at his companion angrily. “What’s the idea?” he demanded. “You want me to break my neck? I thought I was supposed to be a valuable piece of property.”
    The young man with glasses, who wore about his neck on a sling a tape recorder with a mike taped to his vocal cords, recorded a comment and then spoke aloud. He said mildly, “We shall have to do something about that panic reaction in face of heights.”
    “What?”
    The young man smiled faintly and gestured through the door. “Go across the room, please.”
    Bewildered, Joe looked again. He dropped on one kneeand felt to find out whether the drop beyond the threshold was an illusion or real. It was real. His groping arm encountered nothing solid.
    Frowning, he rose to his feet again and looked about him. The room was not a room. It was just a shaft. The light—bluish, even—revealed a door opposite the one where he was standing. It also revealed rings like a gymnasium’s, hung on ropes from the ceiling. If he jumped, he could probably make the nearest ring with one hand. Then he could swing along the line of rings till he got a footing on a plank about six or eight inches wide, cantilevered out from the far wall. He could walk along the plank for twenty feet and come within arm’s reach of the other door.
    He took a deep breath, poised himself, trying to remember that he was subject to gravity of thirty-two feet per second squared—in free orbit, he wouldn’t have thought twice about a journey like this—and sprang.
    Grimly, he caught the first ring; the second; the third, and by then his muscles were complaining. How long was it going to take him to readjust completely to gravity? He finished his swinging, and found that hanging from the last ring he was still three inches away from the plank.
    He swung; dropped; wrapped his arms around the plank and levered himself up to a shaky balance. He walked forward, as though he were following a line on level ground, ignoring the sixty feet of air beneath him.
    He leaned one hand on the wall and pressed the door handle with the other hand. The door opened. At the same moment the bluish light in the shaft dimmed. Beyond the newly opened door there was darkness. In the darkness there was a sound of breathing—wet breathing, with a sucking edge to it. Something large and dry rustled. A hairy touch brushed across the back of his hand.
    He shivered involuntarily. From across the shaft the voice of the young man came to him, level and casual.
    “What does that bring to mind, Joe?”
    Joe cursed under his breath. He said sharply, “Spiders!”
    “You don’t like spiders?”
    “Not in the dark. In the light, I don’t care.” Joe felt the hairy touch on his hand again; then something sticky andthick wrapped itself around his wrist. He snatched free, and felt sweat trickle on his forehead.
    “Any idea why not?” the calm, questioning voice went on.
    Joe took a deep breath, pushed himself away from the wall and the door, and balanced in darkness on the narrow plank. He said as steadily as he could, “Yes, as a matter of fact I do know. When I was just a kid, I was put out in the garden under a tree in a carriage, and a spider came and spun a web across my face.”
    “We’ll clear that one out easily enough,” said the young man with glasses briskly. Joe thought how crazy the situation was—discussing phobias on a six-inch plank above a drop like an elevator shaft.
    “Go through the door,” directed the young man from behind him. “I’ll see you on the other