dividuals, like
yourselves."

"But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions--"

"We have no need of one," Korvin said calmly.

"Ah," the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. "And why
not?"

"We call our form of government _democracy_," Korvin said. "It means
the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler."

One of the experts piped up suddenly. "The beings themselves rule each
other?" he said. "This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can
have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his
force, there can be no effective rule."

"That is our form of government," Korvin said.

"You are lying," the expert said.

One of the technicians chimed in: "The machine tells us--"

"Then the machine is faulty," the expert said. "It will be corrected."

Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take
studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects
to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee
another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting
homesick.

It took three days--but boredom never really had a chance to set in.
Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped
for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different
method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.

Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.

On the third day Korvin escaped.

It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most
logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious
mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to
make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that,
and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated.
That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to
intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.

Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the
problem _was_ insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of
thinking.

Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted
to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental
sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his
entire plan, within seconds.

But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this
particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.

The same la