He sat on the edge of his bed, looking around the room as he ate. Three aliens were visible, two of them working at one of the consoles, the third lying on what looked like a sort of stretched-out vaulting horse in the lounge area. None of them seemed to be paying all that much attention to him, but he somehow doubted he was being ignored.

Still, they were aliens; and any excessive sense of privacy he might have once had had been burned out by fifteen years in the Fleet. He finished his breakfast, stripped off his decidedly rancid jumpsuit, and stepped into the shower.

The standard Fleet-shower soap drip was missing, but with some experimentation he discovered that a bumpy section of wall near the shower head was a thick slab of some soapy substance. He scrubbed himself clean and shut off the water, remembering only then that there was no towel out there to dry off with. But that was okay. Simply being able to take a shower had made him feel like a civilized human being again, and if he had to walk around buck naked while he air-dried, it was a small price to pay.

He brushed off the excess water and stepped out. To his mild surprise he discovered that his old jumpsuit was gone, replaced by a new one that had been laid neatly across the bed. "Good maid service," he murmured. He walked across to it, glancing around the room as he did so—

And suddenly felt a surge of adrenaline jolt through him. There, off to his left, a vertical crack was visible in the wall of his cell. A vertical crack that bisected the milky-white lock mechanism set into the wall.

It was the edge of the door to his cell. And it was open.

He continued on to his bed, looking around quickly as he tried to kick his brain cells into activity. Could his captors really have left the door open when they brought in the fresh jumpsuit? No—surely they wouldn't have been that careless. It had to be a test of some sort. A test to see what he would do if they offered him a way to escape.

He sat down on the bed, picking up the jumpsuit and pretending to examine it. On the face of it the whole thing was so blatantly obvious as to be an insult to his intelligence. Here he was, barely recovered from four days of illness, imprisoned on an unknown world with nothing but the clothes they themselves had provided for him; and they expected him to jump at the first hint of a way out?

Or were they expecting a different reaction entirely? A reaction like charging out and trying to kill the aliens in the outer room?

His hand, he noticed suddenly, was dry where he was touching the jumpsuit: the material seemed to have wicked the water away from his skin. Possibly why they hadn't provided him with a towel in the first place. He started to get dressed, watching the aliens out of the corner of his eye as he did so. They were still just going about their business, completely oblivious to the open door.

All right, he told himself as he finished sealing the jumpsuit. It had to be a test, which meant that ignoring the door would tell them only that he was smart enough to be suspicious. But with luck maybe he could use it to plant a few false assumptions. Stuffing the empty water tube awkwardly into the top of his jumpsuit, he mentally crossed his fingers and stepped to the door.

The one time he'd seen them use it, the door had swung open on its own at the touch of a button on a milky-white plate set into the cell wall near the door's edge. It wasn't nearly so easy to push open by hand, but it was also not nearly as hard as Pheylan tried to make it look. Whatever method he used to eventually break out of this place would almost certainly include simple raw strength, and the more the aliens underestimated human muscle power, the better chance he'd have.

So he pushed hard against the door, clenching his teeth as he strained to inch it open, hoping that those who were watching couldn't see that his shoulder was simultaneously pushing against the wall itself. He shifted to a two-handed grip on door and jamb as soon as it was far enough open, grimacing all the more dramatically as he forced tired muscles to strain isometrically against each other and against the skintight material of the jumpsuit. He got it open just far enough and squeezed out.

The three aliens were watching him now, all right. But there was no mad scramble for the door or for hidden weapons. Sacrificial goats, for sure, there to draw the tiger in for the attack.

An attack Pheylan had no intention of making. He'd demonstrated his physical weakness with the door; now it was time to demonstrate his innate innocence and lack of aggression. Stepping up to the nearest alien, he pulled the water tube out of his tunic and held it out. "Do you suppose," he said, "that I could have some more of this?"

They led him back to his cell, one of them going off to one of the consoles to refill the water tube. This time the door was closed properly behind him.

Apparently, that part of the test was over. Pheylan wondered whether he'd passed or failed.

He drank half the water, then lay down on his side on the cot. Propping his head up with the pillow, resting one hand against the smooth coolness of the cell wall, he gazed out at the aliens as they resumed their work.

Or at least he hoped it looked as if he were watching them. At the moment he was far more interested in the wall of his cell.

His first reaction on seeing it had been to identify it as glass. Later, before succumbing to his illness, he'd changed his mind and decided it was probably a plastic. Now, running his fingertips and nails across the material, he decided he'd been right the first time. An incredibly tough glass, undoubtedly, and a good five centimeters thick on top of it, but a glass nonetheless.

He turned over to lie on his back, trying to think. Glass was a noncrystalline substance, often but not always silicon based. Generally acid resistant, though there were one or two acids that he vaguely remembered would attack it. An old memory drifted up from the past: the time he, Aric, and Melinda had been playing drag ball and he'd driven the ball squarely into the window of his mother's study. The glass itself had survived, but the impact had cracked the framing and popped the pane neatly out onto the desk, knocking over a cup of tea his mother had left there and creating a major mess.

At the corner of his eye, something moved. Pheylan turned to look; but there was nothing there. Just the wall of his cell and the usual flickering of lights from the consoles on that side.

"Cavv'ana."

Pheylan sat up and looked the other way. Standing just outside his cell were three of the aliens. From the design of their jumpsuits, he tentatively identified them as the three who'd accosted him on the ground outside the ship. "Hello," he said, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and sitting up. "And how are you today?"

The alien in the center regarded him for a moment, the tip of his tongue flicking in and out of his beak. "I well," he said in a deep voice. "You well?"

For a second the whole thing went straight past Pheylan. Then, abruptly, his mental gears caught with a grinding jerk.

The alien had spoken in English.

"I'm much better," he managed, staring at the creature. "I was sick for a few days."

"Who few days?"

Pheylan frowned. Then he got it. "Not who; what. What is a few days," he corrected. "In this case a few is four." He held up four fingers. "Four days."

The alien paused as if digesting that. "I bring your container," he said. He gestured with his tongue to the alien on his left and the pod survival kit gripped in his hand. "You want?"

"Yes, I do," Pheylan said, standing up. "Thank you."

The alien with the bag took a step to the side and knelt down beside the cell door. Three small white squares were set into the glass near the floor, positioned just about right for hinges and a lock. The alien did something with the upper square, and a flat rectangle of the wall swung down. The survival kit turned out to be slightly larger than the opening, but with a little effort he got it through. "Thank you," Pheylan said again as the alien closed the flap.