rget that we were eloping when all this
started."

"It all seems so long ago," she said with a thick voice. "And I wish we
were back there--no, Steve, I wish Mekstrom's Disease had never
happened--I wish--"

"Stop wishing and think," I told her half-humorously. "If there were no
Mekstrom's Disease, the chances are that we'd never have met in the
first place."

"That's the cruel part of it all," she cried. And I mean _cried_.

I rapped on the metal bars with a fist. "So here we are," I said
unhappily. "I can't help you now, Catherine."

She put her hands through the bars and held my face between them. She
looked searching into my eyes, as if straining to force her blocked
telepath sense through the deadness of the area. She leaned against the
steel but the barrier was very effective; our lips met through the cold
metal. It was a very unsatisfactory kiss because we had to purse our
lips like a pair of piccolo players to make them meet. It was like
making love through a keyhole.

This unsatisfactory lovemaking did not last long. Unsteadily, Catherine
said, "I want you, Steve."

Inwardly I grinned, and then with the same feeling as if I'd laughed out
loud at a funeral, I said, "Through these steel bars?"

She brought out a little cylindrical key. Then went to a brass wall
plate beside the outer door, inserted the key, and turned. The sliding
door to my cell opened on noiseless machined slides.

Then with a careful look at me, Catherine slipped a little shutter over
the glass bull's eye in the door. Her hand reached up to a hidden toggle
above the door and as she snapped it, a thick cover surged out above the
speaker, television lens, and microphone grille, curved down and shut
off the tell-tales with a cushioned sound. Apparently the top management
of the joint used these cells for other things than mere containment of
unruly prisoners. I almost grinned; the society that Scholar Phelps
proposed was not the kind that flourished in an atmosphere of trust, or
privacy--except for the top brass.

Catherine turned from her switch plate and came across the floor with
her face lifted and her lips parted.

"Hold me, Steve."

My hand came forward in a short jab that caught her dead center in the
plexus below the ribs. Her breath caught in one strangled gasp and her
eyes went glassy. She swayed stiffly in half-paralysis. My other hand
came up, closing as it rose, until it became a fist that connected in a
shoulder-jarr