I WILL NOT BORE YOU with what happened during the ensuing six weeks; suffice it to say that I learned a lot from Harkas Yen, the elderly man into whose keeping I had been placed. I learned, for instance, that he was a psychiatrist, and that I had been placed in his hands for observation. When the girl who had screamed had reported me, and the police had come and arrested me, they had all thought that I was a lunatic.

Harkas Yen taught me the language; and I learned it quickly, because I have always been something of a linguist. As a child, I travelled much in Europe, going to schools in France , Italy and Germany , while my father was the military attach at those legations; and so I imagine I developed an aptitude for languages.

He questioned me most carefully when he discovered that the language I spoke was wholly unknown in his world, and eventually he came to believe the strange story I told him of my transition from my own world to his.

I do not believe in transmigration, reincarnation or metempsychosis, and neither did Harkas Yen; but we found it very difficult to adjust our beliefs to the obvious facts of my case. I had been on Earth, a planet of which Harkas Yen had not the slightest knowledge; and now I was on Poloda, a planet of which I had never heard. I spoke a language that no man on Poloda had ever heard, and I could not understand one word of the five principal languages of Poloda.