has deteriorated almost to extinction and the mind has been
nurtured in a hothouse atmosphere. Where, you might say, the mind has
fed on the decay of the body."

"No," said Mersey, voicing the traveler's conviction. "You paint a
highly distorted picture of our world."

"I theorize, of course," Dr. Cloyd agreed. "But it's a valid theory,
based on intimate knowledge of my own world and what you've told me of
yours."

"You make a basic error, I think," Mersey said, speaking for the
unwilling visitor. "You assume that I have been able to make contact
only with this deranged mind. That is wrong. I have shared the
experiences of many of you--a man, a boy, a woman about to bear a
child. Even a cat. And with each of these, my mind has been perfectly
attuned. I was able to share and enjoy their experiences, their
pleasures, to love with them and to fear, although they had no
knowledge of my presence.

[Illustration]

"Only since I came to this poor mind have I failed to achieve true
empathy. I have been shocked by his madness and I've tried to resist
it, to help him overcome it. But I've failed and it apparently has
imprisoned me. Whereas I was able to leave the minds of the others
almost at will, with poor Mersey I'm trapped. I can't transfer to you,
for instance, as I could normally from another. If there's a way out,
I haven't found it. Have you a theory for this?"

In spite of his distress at these revelations, the traveler was
intrigued, now that they had been voiced for him, and he was eager to
hear Dr. Cloyd's interpretation of them.

The psychiatrist took a pipe out of his pocket, filled it, lighted it
and puffed slowly on it until it was drawing well.

"Continuing to accept your postulate that you're not Mersey, but an
alien inhabiting his mind," the doctor said finally, "I can enlarge on
my theory without changing it in any basic way.

"Your world is not superior to ours, much as it may please you to
believe that it is. Nature consists of a balance, and that balance
must hold true whether in Sioux City, or Mars, or in the fourth
dimension, or in your world, wherever that may be. Your world is out
of balance. Evidently it has been going out of balance for some time.

"Your salvation lies not in further evolution in your world--since
your way of evolving proved wrong, and may prove fatal--but in a
change in course, back along the evolutionary path to a society which
developed naturally, with the mind and th