r job to crash your ship?" the Ruler said. "Wasteful."

Korvin shrugged again. "What I say is true," he announced. "Do you
have tests for such matters?"

"We do," the Ruler told him. "We are an exact and a scientific race. A
machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology.
It will be attached to you."

Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two
technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels,
dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and
straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector--and Korvin felt
himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to
match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a
hypnopaedic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been
wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that
necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle.
The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable
addition to the Comity of Nations.

Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And
Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly.

He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed
him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his
job--not to mention the strongest personal inclinations--demanded most
strongly that he stay alive.

He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the
seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and
elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final
screws, he made no resistance.

"We shall test the machine," the Ruler said. "In what room are you?"

"In the Room of the Ruler," Korvin said equably.

"Are you standing or sitting?"

"I am sitting," Korvin said.

"Are you a _chulad_?" the Ruler asked. A _chulad_ was a small native
pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch
beetle.

"I am not," he said.

* * * * *

The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on
receiving it. "You will tell an untruth now," he said. "Are you
standing or sitting?"

"I am standing," Korvin said.

The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning
manner, reasonably satisfied. "The machine," he announced, "has been
adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now
continue."

Korvin sw