the two couches in it. A door, now
closed, led into a room in which they had received their instructions.
But Smith hardly had listened. Geria knew the game well enough, and he'd
let it go at that. The rasping voice of the female instructor had
annoyed him, anyway, but he noticed that she was a woman of Bortinot,
not beautiful like Geria, but of her planet nonetheless.

"Psi-powers again," Geria told him. "Hypnotism and telepathy mostly.
You'll see...."

Something which looked like a candle-flame seen through a long dark tube
flickered from the ceiling. It came closer, steadied, flickered no more.
Smith couldn't draw his eyes away from it.

"You're asleep," Geria told him, matter-of-factly.

He was. Not really, because in sleep there was a lack of awareness. But
he could not move and everything was dark and he could only think.

He felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. A mind without a body, in complete
darkness. The tingle of awareness which you hardly regard as such
because it always is with you was gone. Nothing.

And then it returned. He felt his heart beating again. His ear itched
and he scratched it. He shifted his left arm which had fallen asleep.

Oddly, the ceiling light had moved. It had been just to the right of
center--now it was just to the left, flickering again, retreating. It
was gone.

He turned over on his left side, sleepily, contentedly--on the brink of
real sleep. Geria knew what she was doing. He'd rest. He looked--at his
own sleeping figure!

Madness toyed with the edges of his mind, gained inroads, made him look
again. The silent figure to his left--himself. He raised his hands, felt
the hair, long, flowing, billowing about his head--looked down, could
see the gentle rounded rise of breast.

A voice nibbled at consciousness, repeated itself, became clearer,
laughing: "_We will go to sleep now, Smith. How does it feel to be here
with me? Let's dream. Dream--_"

The voice reassured, and Smith-Geria relaxed, slept.

* * * * *

_He, Geria of Bortinot--really she, then--stood on a hill. A weathered
hill and aged, on a frigid world where winds of winter raged and howled
and battered mountains into submissive mounds. Fearful place, grim and
almost dead it was--and yet he liked it. Smiling, he stood atop the hill
and bade the tempest strike. The winds hurled him headlong and he
stumbled, but he felt elated, wild and free, part of the elements that
did battle th