and
another to a historian. Semantics, anyone?

In Chapter Ten, right at the beginning, there is a conversation between
Commander Frank and Frater Vincent, and "agent of the Assembly" (read:
_priest_). If the reader will go back over that section, keeping in mind
the fact that what they are "actually" talking about are the Catholic
Church and the Christian religion _as seen from the viewpoint of a
couple of fanatically devout Sixteenth Century Spaniards_, he will
understand the method I used in presenting the whole story.

Let me quote:

"Mentally, the commander went through the symbol-patterns that he had
learned as a child--the symbol-patterns that brought him into direct
contact with the Ultimate Power, the Power that controlled not only the
spinning of atoms and the whirling of electrons in their orbits, but the
workings of probability itself."

Obviously, he is reciting the _Pater Noster_ and the _Ave Maria_. The
rest of the sentence is self-explanatory.

So is the following:

"Once indoctrinated into the teachings of the Universal Assembly, any
man could tap that power to a greater or lesser degree, depending on his
mental control and ethical attitude. At the top level, a first-class
adept could utilize that Power for telepathy, psychokinesis, levitation,
teleportation, and other powers that the commander only vaguely
understood."

It doesn't matter whether _you_ believe in the miracles attributed to
many of the Saints; Pizarro certainly did. His faith in that Power was
as certain as the modern faith in the power of the atomic bomb.

As a matter of fact, it was very probably that hard, unyielding Faith
which made the Sixteenth Century Spaniard the almost superhuman being
that he was. Only Spain of the Sixteenth Century could have produced the
Conquistadors or such a man as St. Ignatius Loyola, whose learned,
devout, and fanatically militant Society of Jesus struck fear into the
hearts of Protestant and Catholic Princes alike for the next two
centuries.

The regular reader of Astounding may remember that I gave another
example of the technique of truthful misdirection in "The Best Policy,"
(July, 1957). An Earthman, captured by aliens, finds himself in a
position in which he is unable to tell even the smallest lie. But by
telling the absolute truth, he convinces the aliens that _homo sapiens_
is a race of super-duper supermen. He does it so well that the aliens
surrender without attacking, even before t