Jonathan had no way of knowing how much time he had spent in the dark. The bastards had removed his watch and every stitch of clothing, before dousing him with disinfectant and throwing him in here. He had heard that spelunkers usually misjudged time; they would stay underground for weeks and believe only a few days had passed. But the big difference was that the spelunkers were having fun. Time passes faster when you’re having fun.

How had Einstein described it? When a man sits with a pretty woman for an hour, it seems only a minute. But sit that man on a hot stove for a minute, and it’s longer than any hour. Biological clocks ran slower and faster—slower when one traveled faster; faster when one needed to be patient to win the prize of physical affection and the future of one’s genes. Theory of relativity? Curse, yes.

After an immeasurable time that might have been days or weeks, the lights came on; but no matter what new horrors the light might reveal, Jonathan Wayville was ready to receive them—and prefer them—to the unbearable torture of sensory deprivation.

He found one wall of his prison to be a window into a dimly illuminated fish tank, slightly larger than a studio apartment. He guessed that it must have been energy expensive to rocket all those tons of water through interstellar space, and that even if the tank provided secondary storage for propellant, the enemy would not have brought it along unless it were absolutely necessary.

A carpet of black, fernlike fronds hung down from the tank’s ceiling, looking like a British garden grown disastrously out of control. Two silver, crablike machines hung upside-down among the fronds. At first glance, Jonathan thought they might be the enemy, but he realized immediately that the “crabs” were mere automatons, little different from the “spiders” and “mice” that tended the rigging and engine parts of Earthly Valkyries. Little different, he thought, until one of them uprooted a frond and began hurrying toward the bottom of the tank. He noticed, then, how much shorter and thinner it was than a conventional spider, and how infinitely more graceful.

And there, on the bottom, with its back to him, lay the enemy. The crab rushed over to it with the frond, and without even turning to look, the creature reached out, snatched the black weed, and popped it into its mouth. Seconds later, it belched thick, brown dust out a siphon.

Like Hollis and Wayville, it wore nothing. To judge from its nakedness, Jonathan would have been inclined to interpret the scene before him as meaning that a crab-caged creature like himself had been collected from another world and, like a fish in a tank, was now being fed by its owner. But the console around which the creature’s body was wrapped, and the touch-tone screen which, Jonathan guessed correctly, was transmitting actual pictures through its tentacles, made very clear who was master and who was servant in this house.