ing
point. And while they were playing a game for our sanity, I played a
game for our lives. I could not share it with any of you because it was
a game only I, of us all, have experience in. Paresi was right to a
certain degree when he said I had retreated into abstraction--the
abstraction of chess. He was wrong, though, when he concluded I had been
driven to it. You can be quite sure that I did it by choice. It was
simply a matter of translating the contactual evidence into an
equivalent idea-system.

"I learned very rapidly that when they play a game, they abide by the
rules. I know the rules of chess, but I did not know the rules of their
game. They did not give me their rules. They simply permitted me to
convey mine to them.

"I learned a little more slowly that, though their power to reach our
minds is unheard-of in any of the seven galaxies we know about, it still
cannot take and use any but the ideas in the forefront of our
consciousness. In other words, chess was a possibility. They could be
forced to take a sacrificed piece, as well as being forced to lose one
of their own. They extrapolate a sequence beautifully--but they can be
out-thought. So much for that: I beat them at chess. And by confining my
efforts to the chessboard, where I knew the rules and where they
respected them, I was able to keep what we call sanity. Where you were
disturbed because the port disappeared, I was not disturbed because the
disappearance was not chess.

"You're wondering, of course, how they did what they did to us. I don't
know. But I can tell you what they did. They empathize--that is, see
through our eyes, feel with our fingertips--so that they perceive what
we do. Second, they can control those perceptions; hang on a distortion
circuit, as Ives would put it, between the sense organ and the brain.
For example, you'll find all our fingerprints all around the port
control, where, one after the other, we punched the wall and thought we
were punching the button.

"You're wondering, too, what I did to break their hold on us. Well, I
simply believed what I knew to be the truth; that the ship is unharmed
and unchanged. I measured it with a steel tape and it was so. Why didn't
they force me to misread the tape? They would have, if I'd done that
measuring first. At the start they were in the business of turning every
piece of pragmatic evidence into an outright lie. But I outlasted the
test. When they'd finished with their whole a