shouting back at him; I stopped to watch. All of a sudden six
or seven men moved in from somewhere and dragged him down from where he
was standing. There was a fight--people were thrown all around. I hid
till it was over.

"When the crowd finally cleared, there was Rene. His clothes were torn,
but he wasn't hurt. Every one of the men who had attacked him had to be
carried away; I think one of them was dead. Rene stood there laughing;
then he saw me hidden in the darkness and he took me home. He told me
that when he'd been younger he'd worked his way all the way in to Earth,
and studied some of the cultures there. He'd learned karate, which was
an ancient Japanese way of fighting."

Rynason took a deep breath. "He said everything a person learns will be
useful someday. And I believed him."

"A nice parable," Mara said. "We could use him against the Hirlaji,
though."

Rynason was silent, thinking. If they could only catch the aliens off
guard ... but of course they couldn't, now. He let his eyes wander
aimlessly along the circuitry surrounding them. Tell me, old Kor, what
do we do now?

After a moment his eyes narrowed; he reached up and traced a connection
with his fingers, back to the front, toward the altar. It led directly
to ... the speaker!

The voice of Kor.

And if he could interrupt that connection, put his own voice through the
speaker, out through the altar....

"Mara, we're going out. I've found my own brand of karate for our
friends out there."

He helped her to her feet. She moved somewhat painfully, her broken left
arm hanging stiffly at her side, but she made no protest.

"We've got to be fast," he said. "I don't know how well this will
work--it depends on how much they trust their clay-footed god today."
Quickly, he outlined his plan. Mara listened silently and nodded.

Then he set to work. It was largely guesswork, following those intricate
alien connections, but Rynason had seen this part of such machines
before. He found the penultimate point at which the impulses from the
brain were translated into sound and broadcast through the speaker. He
disconnected this, his torn fingers working awkwardly on the delicate
linkages.

"Ready?"

Mara was just inside the narrow passage behind the altar. She nodded
quickly.

Rynason twisted himself so that he could speak directly into the input
of the speaker. He raised his voice to approximate the thin, high sounds
of the Hirlaji language.

_Rem