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It turned out that Madge and I were going to have a big trial. After being tied up every which way in jail all night, we were taken to a courtroom, where television cameras stared at us.

Madge and I were worn to frazzles, because neither one of us had been cooped up in a body that long since I don’t know when. Just when we needed to think more than we ever had, in jail before the trial, the bodies developed hunger pains and we couldn’t get them comfortable on the cots, no matter how we tried; and, of course, the bodies just had to have their eight hours sleep.

The charge against us was a capital offense on the books of the enemy—desertion. As far as the enemy was concerned, the amphibians had all turned yellow and run out on their bodies, just when their bodies were needed to do brave and important things for humanity.

We didn’t have a hope of being acquitted. The only reason there was a trial at all was that it gave them an opportunity to sound off about why they were so right and we were so wrong. The courtroom was jammed with their big brass, all looking angry and brave and noble.

"Mr. Amphibian," said the prosecutor, "you are old enough, aren’t you, to remember when all men had to face up to life in their bodies, and work and fight for what they believed in?"

"I remember when the bodies were always getting into fights, and nobody seemed to know why, or how to stop it," I said politely. "The only thing everybody seemed to believe in was that they didn’t like to fight."

"What would you say of a soldier who ran away in the face of fire?" he wanted to know.

"I’d say he was scared silly."

"He was helping to lose the battle, wasn’t he?"

"Oh, sure." There wasn’t any argument on that one.

"Isn’t that what the amphibians have done—run out on the human race in the face of the battle of life?"

"Most of us are still alive, if that’s what you mean," I said.

It was true. We hadn’t licked death, and weren’t sure we wanted to, but we’d certainly lengthened life something amazing, compared to the span you could expect in a body.

"You ran out on your responsibilities!" he said.

"Like you’d run out of a burning building, sir," I said.

"Leaving everyone else to struggle on alone!"

"They can all get out the same door that we got out of. You can all get out any time you want to. All you do is figure out what you want and what your body wants, and concentrate on—"

The judge banged his gavel until I thought he’d split it. Here they’d burned every copy of Konigswasser’s book they could find, and there I was giving a course in how to get out of a body over a whole television network.

"If you amphibians had your way," said the prosecutor, "everybody would run out on his responsibilities, and let life and progress as we know them disappear completely."

"Why, sure," I agreed. "That’s the point."

"Men would no longer work for what they believe in?" he challenged.

"I had a friend back in the old days who drilled holes in little square thingamajigs for seventeen years in a factory, and he never did get a very clear idea of what they were for. Another one I knew grew raisins for a glassblowing company, and the raisins weren’t for anybody to eat, and he never did find out why the company bought them. Things like that make me sick—now that I’m in a body, of course—and what I used to do for a living makes me even sicker."

"Then you despise human beings and everything they do," he said.

"I like them fine—better than I ever did before. I just think it’s a dirty shame what they have to do to take care of their bodies. You ought to get amphibious and see how happy people can be when they don’t have to worry about where their body’s next meal is coming from, or how to keep it from freezing in the wintertime, or what’s going to happen to them when their body wears out."

"And that, sir, means the end of ambition, the end of greatness!"

"Oh, I don’t know about that," I said. "We’ve got some pretty great people on