A week had passed since George had discovered that his new home was nothing more than a zoo cage. It was a week of ever increasing despair, hopelessness, horrible food—and a constant stream of gawking teddy bear creatures pointing and peering at them through the window walls of their new home.

That first day, after he found out they were zoo specimens, George had nearly gone crazy. Although he was usually quiet and well behaved, he couldn’t stand the thought of being trapped in some alien zoo.

And so he started to destroy things. First, he bashed a kitchen chair against the locked kitchen door they couldn’t get open. It didn’t open the door, but the chair broke in pieces—to the great satisfaction of the watching crowd, who cheered and shouted in glee.

Then George started bashing more chairs, or toasters or dishes, or anything else he could find, against the window wall of the kitchen. This nearly drove the watching teddy bears wild with excitement. Each time he hurled an object at them, they would shout and clap their hands, and many of them would point little silver boxes at him that flashed—which were obviously cameras! The zoo’s new prize catch was putting on quite a show!

And George didn’t stop. After cautiously tasting a dozen different foods in the refrigerator and cupboards—all of which had the same unbearable, bland, gluey taste—he started throwing them at the window as well. The teddy bears loved it. Even after the window became all smeared with ice cream, George could still see their little eyes peering at him from the pockets of window that were still clean.

After that he had gone into the living room and started destroying the furniture. His audience was ecstatic. What a show! After he finished off the living room furniture, he went into the bedroom. By the time he had finished up there, his audience were clapping their hands and cheering him on. There was no doubt in their minds that their zoo had acquired its best specimen yet!

That evening, after the crowds of gawking watchers had finally disappeared (apparently, the zoo had closed for the day), George sat panting tiredly in what was left of a living room lounge chair. The protector, who had said little during his tirade, sat on the floor next to the TV remote control, flipping through the channels. The TV was one of the few things George did not destroy, since it seemed to be their only link to the outside world.

Suddenly they heard the door in the kitchen open. George leaped up and raced into the kitchen, ready to do battle with any number of teddy bears, just to get out of this prison! Nothing was going to stop him.

But the purple gas did. The air was filled with it as soon as George, the Protector and Emberly came racing into the room. After that, they were like obedient servants—like puppets on a string—fulfilling every command of their smiling, fuzzy captors.

George found out very quickly that the purple gas didn’t work on the bears themselves, even when they breathed it in like he did. He tried commanding the teddy bears to stand aside and let him go, but to no avail. They just laughed and went about restocking the refrigerator and cupboards with more bland food, cleaning the window/wall, and replacing the broken furniture. Like any good zoo keepers, they clearly intended to make their prize exhibit ready for another big day tomorrow. By the time they left, the entire apartment had been restored to perfection, with no sign of George’s destruction in sight.

The days that followed were a letdown for the watching teddy bears, and a time of increasing despair for George. He didn’t destroy things again, since he knew that wouldn’t do any good. It was obvious they had him completely trapped, and there was no way out of his prison. He had to face the reality of living the rest of his life forcing down glue food and being gawked at by teddy bears.

The TV didn’t help. By the second day they had discovered that all of the channels merely played the same shows over and over again. Apparently, the teddy bears had recorded what they thought would be a sufficient number of shows to keep George and the others entertained for life, and simply played them repeatedly.

George hated the kitchen most of all. The food always looked so good, yet invariably tasted terrible. He hardly ate anything for the first two days—his stomach just couldn’t take it. But the Protector kept pushing him to eat, telling him he needed his strength so he would be ready when they had an opportunity to escape. And he kept promising George that an opportunity to escape would come, even though everything looked bleak now.

In spite of the Protector’s optimism however, George could see no way for them to get out of their prison. But the combination of the Protector’s urging and his own starvation finally drove him to eat a bit of broccoli from the refrigerator. Although he normally hated broccoli like everybody else, for some reason the glue taste of the broccoli didn’t seem quite as strong as the other food in the kitchen. George ate the whole broccoli stalk—something that would have astounded his mother, back home.

The only thing that kept George going during these dark days were the books in the living room. There weren’t many of these—just a few hardback volumes on a single bookshelf. It looked like the teddy bears had raided the book section of a thrift store on earth, since the books were old and battered, and consisted of a hodgepodge of odd titles. There was one on auto mechanics, another on the best ways to cook artichokes, and another on the preferred method to grow petunias. But mixed in with the bizarre were a few good titles that George devoured. He especially loved ‘The Hobbit’ by J.R.R. Tolkien. He also liked ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ by Jules Verne, and ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens.

He would read all day, to the obvious disappointment of his many teddy bear fans outside the window. News of his furniture bashing on the first day must have spread far and wide in the teddy bear world, since the crowds more than doubled every day thereafter for a long time. Many of the impatiently watching teddy bears kept play acting as if they were picking up a chair or object, and throwing it at the window. But George ignored their pleadings, and paid no attention when they pounded incessantly on the glass for him to do something—anything—to keep them entertained. He just kept reading.

The Protector said little during this time as well. If asked, he would break his silence only to say that he was studying out their problem, trying to find a way to escape. He would sit for hours, gazing with glazed, unseeing eyes at the crowd of anxious teddy bears pounding on the glass, or looking at the stars barely visible out the top part of their window at night. At other times during the day, he would flip aimlessly through the TV channels, over and over and over until it nearly drove George crazy. He couldn’t stand to hear the same shows again and again, since they just reminded him of a home he couldn’t get back to. So now when the TV was on, he would usually go into the bedroom, shut the door and read some more.

The only one of the group who seemed to actually enjoy their experience was Emberly. She was just as smiling and cheerful as usual, and couldn’t understand why George and the Protector were so upset. “After all, isn’t one planet as good as another?” she would say to them over and over. George would never reply, and both admired and resented her incredible adaptability to change. Of course, this experience wasn’t completely new to her, since her own world had been destroyed by the Grak, and she had had to adjust to a new life on earth. Perhaps her time on earth had been similar to a prison term in a way, from which she too could never escape to go back to her home world. For her, life on the teddy bear planet was little different.

Emberly spent most of her time in the kitchen, devouring everything in sight. She would eat pickles mixed in a bowl of ice cream, followed by peanut butter spread on the top of mashed potatoes or corn beef. It didn’t matter how the foods were mixed together since they all (except for the broccoli) tasted just the same. She loved the food so well that she started to gain weight. Not pounds, of course, since she was still a Flibbet. But she put on several more ounces than she'd had just the week before, which for a Flibbet is quite a gain.

On the eighth night of their captivity, George couldn’t sleep. He kept tossing and turning in bed, mumbling incoherently. The Protector got up in disgust from the bath towel he had been sleeping on, which was on the nightstand next to the bed. Grumbling under his breath at the noise George was making, he went into the living room to sleep on the couch, where it was quieter. (However, Emberly snoozed on peacefully, on an adjacent bath towel. Nothing ever woke her up.)

After almost the entire night had passed with tossing and turning, George sat up in bed and stared around the darkened room with bleary eyes. Depression covered him like a blanket. Why were they trapped like this, and what were they to do? How could they ever escape this horror?

And what was that creature sitting on the edge of his bed?

“George Brown,” said the creature in a familiar raspy voice, “a new sacrifice will soon need to be made. But until then, remember, things are not always what they seem. You must learn to feel!”

And then with a loud pop, the creature was gone.