ble. Naturally
San-Lan could not understand the nature of my pity for this poor child,
nor the fact that it might have proved a weak spot in my armor. But had
he done so, I truly believe he would have been ready to inflict
degradation, torture and even death upon her, to make me surrender the
information he wanted.

Yet this man, perverted product of a morally degraded race, had about
him something of true dignity; something of sincerity, in a warped,
twisted way. There were times when he seemed to sense vaguely,
gropingly, wonderingly, that he might have a soul.

The Han philosophy for centuries had not admitted the existence of
souls. Its conception embraced nothing but electrons, protons and
molecules, and still was struggling desperately for some shred of
evidence that thoughts, will power and consciousness of self were
nothing but chemical reactions. However, it had gotten no further than
the negative knowledge we had in the Twentieth Century, that a sick body
dulls consciousness of the material world, and that knowledge, which all
mankind has had from the beginning of time, that a dead body means a
departed consciousness. They had succeeded in producing, by synthesis,
what appeared to be living tissues, and even animals of moderately
complex structure and rudimentary brains, but they could not give these
creatures the full complement of life's characteristics, nor raise the
brains to more than mechanical control of muscular tissues.

It was my own opinion that they never could succeed in doing so. This
opinion impressed San-Lan greatly. I had expected him to snort his
disgust, as the extreme school of evolutionists would have done in the
Twentieth Century. But the idea was as new to him and the scientists of
his court as Darwinism was to the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth
Centuries. So it was received with much respect. Painfully and with
enforced mental readjustments, they began a philosophical search for
excuses and justifications for the idea.

* * * * *

All of this amused me greatly, for of course neither the newness nor the
orthodoxy of a hypothesis will make it true if it is not true, nor
untrue if it is true. Nor could the luck or will-power, with which I had
resisted their hypnotists and psychoanalysts, make what might or might
not be a universal fact one whit more or less of a fact than it really
was. But the prestige I had gained among them, and the novelty of my