Front matter (continued 2)

"We'll have to do that for a while, until we work out something better; but it's only a stopgap. We have a problem," Lanny said doggedly. "We know it can be solved, because it has been for ourselves and for Tak Laleen. All we have to find is the method."

"Learning begins with a need," the missionary said. "For you, it was twenty years of despair: invasion, humiliation, surrender. Your old ideas didn't work. You either had to accept status as second-raters or work out a new way of thinking. As for me—" She shrugged her shoulders. "I suppose I couldn't help myself. I did try to run away, remember. I tried every possible answer in terms of our logic first. I even thought, for a while, that Lanny was a robot. Anything but the truth."

Gill asked, "When did you first begin to understand? What happened that made you willing to believe the truth?"

"It was an accumulation of many things, I suppose."

"That isn't specific enough. There must have been one instant when you were willing to give up what you believed and start learning something new."

"I don't know when it was."

They left the government building and walked through the lower courtyards of the city. Groups of Almost-men were being herded back into the city from the game preserve. They clung together, hushed and terrified. The city lights were in working order once more and the flashing colors turned their faces into gargoyle masks. Three guards, in torn and bloodstained uniforms, stood looking at the machines which men had hauled out of the arsenal. Suddenly one of the soldiers began to kick at an abandoned gun, screaming in fury while tears of rage welled from his eyes.

Lanny turned away. It was painfully embarrassing to watch the dissolution of a human personality, even on the relatively immature level which the machine culture of the Almost-men had achieved. But as Tak Laleen watched the spectacle of childish rage, sudden hope blazed in her eyes. She grasped Lan's arm.

"He's blaming the machine for our defeat," she said. "Now I remember what happened to me; now I know! When you were running away from Santa Maria, Lanny, you fired an energy gun at my sphere. It destroyed the force-field and I fell out of the port. I was terrified—not so much of you, but because my machine had failed. All night while I lay in the launch, I faced that awful nightmare. For the first time in my life, I began to doubt the system I had trusted. I lost faith in my own world. I felt a need for something else."

Lanny repeated slowly, "Loss of faith in the status quo—"

"Could we duplicate that for all your people, Tak Laleen?" Gill asked doubtfully.

"Yes, I'm sure we could, Gill. We have a clue; we know what has to be done. And we have an experimental laboratory." The missionary nodded toward the mob of cringing Almost-men coming in from the preserve. "We have a city of people, disorganized by panic, with their faith in the machine already shattered. While we teach these people how to make the reorientation, we'll learn the methods that will work most effectively with my world."

They left the city and began to cross the bridge toward the treaty area. Tak Laleen passed her arms through theirs. She said, with sorrow in her voice, "No matter what we do, no matter how carefully we try to cushion the panic, we still have no way of being entirely sure of the results. Something that works with our prisoners or with us might destroy my world; it could send a planet into mass paranoia."

"That risk is implied in all learning, Tak Laleen," Lanny answered. "We can never escape it. I'm not sure we ought to try. The individual who lives in a closed world of absolutes—shut in by prison walls of his own mind—is already insane. The sudden development of a new idea simply makes the condition apparent."

"In a sense," Gill added, "there is no such thing as a teacher. There are people who expose us to data and try to demonstrate some techniques we can use, but any learning that goes on must come from within ourselves."

"We will develop the most effective method we can," Lanny said. "Then we will apply it to your world, Tak Laleen. The rest is up to them. That's as it should be—as it must be."

Arm in arm they crossed the bridge—two men and a missionary from an alien world. They had been enemies, but during a night of chaos and death they had learned to become men—the first men to catch the vision of the new world of the mind. Each of them was soberly aware that the discovery was not an end, but a beginning. And they faced that beginning with neither fear nor regret, because they had the confidence that comes of maturity. The unknown was not a god-power or a devil-power, but a problem to be solved by the skill of a rational mind.