I know the truth_. Tossing the note aside Dirrul turned on the
water in the shower room and thoughtfully disrobed.

As he threw his tunic aside a violent paralyzing terror seized his
mind, making his head sing with a screeching vibration. Blindly he
snatched up the tunic in order to stuff the cloth into his mouth so he
would not cry out. But as soon as he pressed it against his skin his
terror vanished, like a siren suddenly stilled.

The pattern of the real truth fell into place then. Now he understood
the power of Vinin. Experimentally he took Sorgel's disk out of his
tunic and laid it on a table. As soon as he did so the blinding
nameless horror flamed up. When he held the disk again the exhausting
emotion vanished.

Looking back Dirrul saw an abundance of evidence that might have given
him a clue, had he not spent so much mental effort bolstering his
illusion of Vinin. There was the circumstance of his own unrelenting
terror when he was without the disk in the ravine--the painful sight
of his captors puncturing the prisoners' eardrums--the soundless talk
of the vagabonds, like the lip-reading of the deaf--the bleak
orderliness of the cheering mobs--and, most obvious of all, the
strange transmitters atop the well-guarded stone block-buildings.

It was all there, even to the final cruelty to the children. What was
it the Vininese had said? "The adjustment is sometimes very severe but
on the whole the casualties are light." And the very young, before
they were taken from their parents, didn't need disks because they
were in what the Vininese had called "the instinct period."

Dirrul knew what Hurd's drawing meant. Somehow Hurd had lost his
hearing, perhaps as a result of the beating the police had given him
on Agron. In any case only the deaf could think rationally on Vinin.
Hurd was telling Dirrul to shatter his own sense of hearing if he
still had the will to think and act for himself. The nightmare Dirrul
had witnessed in the ravine was not torture but the bravery of
desperate men attempting to rescue rational minds.

The Rational Potential--the gift of the legendary Earthmen! Like the
processes of thought itself it could never be wiped out by argument or
reason once it was understood. The Earthmen had wasted centuries
trying to undo their own evolved rationality before they realized it
could not be done. Now, on a higher level in another plane, the
Vininese were struggling to submerge the Earthmen's second ac