nd obscuring the view from the monitor screens that were watching them.
Candron knew that the guards were acting now; he knew that the big
Mongols outside were already inserting the key in the door and inserting
their nose plugs; he knew that the men in the monitor room had hit an
alarm button and had already begun to flood the room with sleep gas. But
he paid no attention to these things.

Instead, he became homesick.

Home. It was a little place he knew and loved. He could no longer stand
the alien environment around him; it was repugnant, repelling. All he
could think of was a little room, a familiar room, a beloved room. He
knew the cracks in its ceiling, the feel of the varnish on the homely
little desk, the touch of the worn carpet against his feet, the very
smell of the air itself. And he loved them and longed for them with all
the emotional power that was in him.

And suddenly the darkness of the smoke-filled prison apartment was gone.

Spencer Candron stood in the middle of the little hotel room he had
rented early that morning. In his arms, he held the unconscious figure
of Dr. James Ch'ien.

He gasped for breath, then, with an effort, he stooped, allowed the limp
body of the physicist to collapse over his shoulder, and stood straight
again, carrying the man like a sack of potatoes. He went to the door of
the room and opened it carefully. The hall was empty. Quickly, he moved
outside, closing the door behind him, and headed toward the stair. This
time, he dared not trust the elevator shaft. The hotel only boasted one
elevator, and it might be used at any time. Instead, he allowed his
dislike for the stair treads to adjust his weight to a few pounds, and
then ran up them two at a time.

On the roof of the hotel, he adjusted his emotional state once more, and
he and his sleeping burden drifted off into the night, toward the sea.

* * * * *

No mind is infinitely flexible, infinitely malleable, infinitely capable
of taking punishment, just as no material substance, however
constructed, is capable of absorbing the energies brought to bear
against it indefinitely.

A man can hate with a virulent hatred, but unless time is allowed to
dull and soothe that hatred, the mind holding it will become corroded
and cease to function properly, just as a machine of the finest steel
will become corroded and begin to fail if it is drenched with acid or
exposed to the violence of an oxidiz