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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 through here. And over there–behind you–a little doorslide to another room. You and these other two can be comfortable–“

“For how long?” Lee demanded.

“It should not seem many days. Soon we shall go fast. Please watch it at the window–he would want that. You have been taught some science?”

“Yes. I guess so.”

To Lee it was a weird, unnatural exchange between captor and captive. The voice, intoning the English words so slowly, so carefully, seemed gentle, concerned with his welfare … and afraid of him.

Abruptly the doorslide closed again, and then at once it reopened.

“He would want you to understand what you see,” the man said. “You will find it very wonderful–we did, coming down here. This was his room–so long ago when he used it. His dials are there–you can watch them and try to understand. Dials to mark our distance and our size. The size-change will start soon.”

Size-change? Lee’s numbed mind turned over the words and found them almost meaningless.

“From the window there–what you can see will be very wonderful,” the man said again. “He would want you to study it. Please do that.”

The doorslide closed….

What you can see from the window will be very wonderful. No one, during the days that followed could adequately describe what Lee Anthony and Thomas Franklin and Vivian saw through that lens-window. A vast panorama in monochrome … a soundless drama of the stars, so immense, so awesome that the human mind could grasp only an infinitesimal fragment of its wonders….

They found the little door which led into another apartment. There were tables and chairs of earth-style, quaintly old-fashioned. Food and drink were shoved through the doorslide; the necessities of life and a fair comfort of living were provided. But their questions, even as the time passed and lengthened into what on Earth might have been a week or more, remained unanswered. There was only that gentle but firm negation:

“We have decided that he would want us to say nothing. We do not know about this girl and this smaller man. We brought them so that they could not remain on Earth to talk of having seen us. We are sorry about that. He probably won’t like it.”

“He? Who the devil are you talking about?” Franklin demanded. “See here, if I had you fellows back on Earth now I’d slam you into jail. Damned brigands. You can’t do this to me! My–my father’s one of the most important men in New York–“

But now the doorslide quietly closed.

A week? It could have been that, or more. In a wall recess of the room Lee found a line of tiny dials with moving pointers. Miles–thousands of miles. A million; ten millions; a hundred million. A light-year; tens, thousands. And, for the size-change, a normal diameter, Unit 1–and then up into thousands.

For hours at a time, silent, awed beyond what he had ever conceived the emotion of awe could mean, he sat at the lens-window, staring out and trying to understand.