ree of them seemed able
to continue thinking in a straight line, hold their minds to a subject,
while all the rest grew more vague, less retentive, more content to live
from moment to moment, without concern for past or future.

Except Louie. He too seemed able to hold his thinking in a straight
line, one tangential to theirs. He seemed, in these hours, to have
turned wholly mystical, to a stronger belief that they were being
watched and cared for by some higher power, and that this was for a
purpose. Yet not so tangential, for Cal had come to the same conclusion,
although his interpretation differed.

"I can't doubt that there is an intelligent direction of this peculiar
co-ordinate system," he said to Tom and Jed. "But I must doubt it is
supernatural in the way Louie interprets. Anything appears to be magic
when we don't understand how it happens, and becomes science when we
do."

He paused, and looked at his companions' faces in the starshine. They
were quiet, reposed, listening.

"Ever since man got up off the bottom of his ocean of air," he said,
"and out into space, we've been prepared to run into some form of
intelligence which doesn't behave the way we do. Not prepared to do
anything about it, you understand," he said with a shrug. "Just
theoretically prepared that it might happen. It was a possibility. Now
it does seem to have happened. E McGinnis asked me, before I left Earth,
if I thought Eden was an alluring trap, especially baited to catch some
human beings. It begins to appear that it is."

"I've caught many a wild animal in my day," Jed said slowly,
thoughtfully. "I've pinned 'em up in cages, watched how they behaved. I
guess scientists do that all the time. Don't want to hurt 'em, fact make
'em as comfortable as they can--just want to know about 'em. Sometimes,
after I watched them awhile I'd turn 'em aloose and watch 'em scoot back
to their natural world. That could happen to us. Sometimes they'd die,
and I wouldn't know why. That could happen. Some animals won't bear
young in captivity. We can't because of an operation. Maybe whatever's
holdin' us don't know that, and might turn us aloose when, after a time,
we don't bear any young."

He paused and looked even more thoughtful.

"Sometimes," he added slowly, "after I studied 'em, found out how they
would behave no matter what, I had to kill 'em, because they was too
dangerous to let run around among humans. That could happen."

"I haven't done