the
drug gradually overcoming him....

The room had a small door, and a single round window, like a bullseye
pane of thick lens. Outside there was darkness, with points of stars.
His head was still humming from the remaining effect of the drug. Or was
the humming an outside noise? He was aware as he got to his feet and
staggered to the door, that the humming was distantly outside the room.
The door was locked; its lever resisted his efforts to turn it.

There he saw the inert figures of the girl, and Tom Franklin. They were
lying uninjured on two other small couches against the room's metal
wall. The girl stirred a little as he touched her dank forehead. Her
dyed blonde hair had fallen disheveled to her shoulders. Franklin lay
sprawled, his stiff white shirt bosom dirty and rumpled, his thin sandy
hair dangling over his flushed face. His slack mouth was open. He was
breathing heavily.

At the lens-window Lee stood gasping, his mind still confused and
blurred, trying to encompass what was out there. This was a spaceship! A
small globular thing of white metal. He could see a rim of it, like a
flat ring some ten feet beneath him. A spaceship, and obviously it had
left the Earth! There was a black firmament--dead-black monstrous abyss
with white blazing points of stars. And then, down below and to one side
there was just an edge of a great globe visible. The Earth, with the
sunlight edging its sweeping crescent limb--the Earth, down there with a
familiar coastline and a huge spread of ocean like a giant map in
monochrome.

Back on the couch Lee sat numbed. There was the sound of scraping metal;
a doorslide in the wall opened. A face was there--a man with a blur of
opalescent light behind him.

"You are all right now?" a voice said.

"Yes. I guess so. Let me out of here--"

Let him out of here? To do what? To make them head this thing back to
Earth.... To Lee Anthony as he sat confused, the very thoughts were a
fantasy.... Off the Earth! Out in Space! So often he had read of it, as
a future scientific possibility--but with this actuality now his mind
seemed hardly to grasp it....

The man's voice said gently, "We cannot trust you. There must be no
fighting--"

"I won't fight. What good could it do me?"

"You did fight. That was bad--that was frightening. We must not harm
you--"

"Where are we going?" Lee murmured. "Why in the devil are you--"

"We think now it is best to say nothing. We will give you food th