go on forever. The High Commander had closed his eyes,
and he looked as if he had gone to sleep.

There was more formality. Through it all, MacMaine stood at rigid
attention, flexing his calf muscles occasionally to keep the blood
flowing in his legs. He had no desire to disgrace himself by passing
out in front of the Court.

Finally the Kerothi officer stopped asking Tallis questions and looked
at the High Commander. MacMaine got the feeling that there was about to
be a departure from the usual procedure.

Without opening his eyes, the High Commander said, in a brittle, rather
harsh voice, "These circumstances are unprecedented." Then he opened
his eyes and looked directly at MacMaine. "Never has an animal been
proposed for such an honor. In times past, such a proposal would have
been mockery of this Court and this Ingroup, and a crime of such
monstrous proportions as to merit Excommunication."

MacMaine knew what that meant. The word was used literally; the
condemned one was cut off from all communication by having his sensory
nerves surgically severed. Madness followed quickly; psychosomatic
death followed eventually, as the brain, cut off from any outside
stimuli except those which could not be eliminated without death
following instantly, finally became incapable of keeping the body
alive. Without feedback, control was impossible, and the
organism-as-a-whole slowly deteriorated until death was inevitable.

At first, the victim screamed and thrashed his limbs as the brain sent
out message after message to the rest of the body, but since the brain
had no way of knowing whether the messages had been received or acted
upon, the victim soon went into a state comparable to that of catatonia
and finally died.

If it was not the ultimate in punishment, it was a damned close
approach, MacMaine thought. And he felt that the word "damned" could
be used in that sense without fear of exaggeration.

* * * * *

"However," the High Commander went on, gazing at the ceiling,
"circumstances change. It would once have been thought vile that a
machine should be allowed to do the work of a skilled man, and the
thought that a machine might do the work with more precision and
greater rapidity would have been almost blasphemous.

"This case must be viewed in the same light. As we are replacing
certain of our workers on our outer planets with Earth animals simply
because they are capable o