The first weeks in the enclosure were bad because they did not understand us nor we them, and no relationship had been estab­lished. Instead, they took to us devices that were painful and humiliating. Some of us nearly died and there was an abortive revolt put down with weaponry that made our flesh burn. They thought that we had come to destroy them. Two hundred and forty-eight against a planet.

They did not know that we would tell them anything they asked. They thought that our mission and our knowledge had to be beaten from us by occult means of torture similar to devices that our own hierarchies had repudiated. Some were terribly hurt in those first weeks because their confessions were judged to be not truthful, and only when formulae for alchemy that one of us gave them turned out to work did the torture cease.

Can I be blamed for not wanting to relive those early weeks? It is not cowardice but compassion; I could not bear to see my shipmates suffer again. And the torturers as well, for the instru­ments always turn the other way.

My therapist tells me now that all of this was merely a dread­ful failure of communication and that as soon as their experiments and findings began to corroborate, those who had been in charge of the enclosure were discharged in disgrace, some of them imprisoned. I do not know if this is actually so or if we were told this to solicit our further cooperation, but I do not think that it matters particularly, either way. Whether a new administration or a chastened older one took over, our accommodations became somewhat larger, the food a little better, and we were given a schedule providing for some free time and conversation with one another. Not that we had or have anything of interest to say. Can I be blamed for not wanting the tortures again?

I have learned to trust my therapist. It is the easier way. I try to find credible all that he says to me. Once, when information I gave on the half-life of radioactive fossils was not verified quickly enough to satisfy, he subjected me to deep hypnosis and starvation, tormented me by playing on ganglia with sensors . . . but shortly thereafter the fault turned out to have been an equipment malfunction and he was extremely apologetic. This was early after his assignment to my case. He not only suspended all questioning for two days but arranged for me to be given a large, private room at the rear of a corridor instead of my participating in the dormitory arrangement given to most of my shipmates. It was at about that time that I began to be truly successful with the females, although it has now been a long time since I have permitted any of them to come to my room. I invade theirs. I toy with their possessions. I hold my own privacy more valuable than theirs.

“Our demands upon you cannot be indefinite,” he has assured me. “Despite our native suspicion, despite our lust for torture, we are a race given to odd moods of guilt or compassion, swings toward altruism and self-flagellation and in the bargain there is a very strong mystical pattern which underlies almost all of our cultures, one which has to deal with martyrdom and redemption. The benefits you have given us are incalculable; part of their feedback will be changed attitudes toward you that will result in equitable treatment. Believe. Believe.”

I am given assurances of this nature often, and they comfort me. But my therapist still refuses to divulge his name or details of his personal life although I frequently ask these now. “It wouldn’t make any difference, you see,” he has pointed out. “Our lives, our society, our identity is so totally alien to you that there is virtually none of this which you could understand or which would contribute to our relationship. I could tell you, say, for speculation, that my name is X and that I live in monogamous relationship with S, a woman: I could say that I am Y and that I dwell inside a homosexual commune with J and L, my partners in lust and necessity. What would it matter? What could you make of all this or know of the quality of our lives? In time I hope that you will be free and come to understand us and that we will know one another. But that time is not yet. Not just yet, I fear. Besides, we are under strict orders still to divulge nothing and I cannot break with the administrators on this very important point, not if I want to stay here and continue to help you.”

He has small hands and a high voice. He seems to perch on the edge of appliances rather than sit or straddle them. Like most of them I have seen he appears to be more delicately constructed than we, although the basic anatomical features are identical. Identical; I could enter one of their females; silly, sad creatures on the periphery of the enclosure, bringing us food and checking, every so often, our elimination-functions.