re all
out, the ones from Gonzales' area can be started." He thought for a
moment. "I'll want four or five of them left here to help me when you
start bringing more shoonoon in from other areas. How soon do you think
you'll have another class for me?"

"Two or three days, if everything goes all right. We have the villages
and plantations in the south under pretty tight control now; we can
start gathering them up right away. As soon as we get things stabilized
here, we can send reinforcements to the north. We'll have transport for
you in three hours."

The general blanked out. He turned from the screen. Travis was laughing
happily.

"Miles, did anybody ever tell you you were a genius?" he asked. "That
last jolt you gave them was perfect. Why didn't you tell us about it in
advance?"

"I didn't know about it in advance; I didn't think of it till I'd
started talking to them. No cream or sugar for me."

"Cream," Edith said, lifelessly. "Why did you do it? Why didn't you just
tell them the truth?"

Travis asked her to define the term. She started to say something bitter
about Jesting Pilate. Miles interrupted.

"In spite of Lord Beacon, Pilate wasn't jesting," he said. "And he
didn't stay for an answer because he knew he'd die of old age waiting
for one. What kind of truth should I have told them?"

"Why, what you started to tell them. That Beta moves in a fixed orbit
and can't get any closer to Alpha--"

"There's been some work done on the question since Pilate's time,"
Travis said. "My semantics prof at Command College had the start of an
answer. He defined truth as a statement having a practical
correspondence with reality on the physical levels of structure and
observation and the verbal order of abstraction under consideration."

"He defined truth as a statement. A statement exists only in the mind of
the person making it, and the mind of the person to whom it is made. If
the person to whom it is made can't understand or accept it, it isn't
the truth."

"They understood when you showed them that the planet is round, and they
understood that tri-dimensional model of the system. Why didn't you let
it go at that?"

"They accepted it intellectually. But when I told them that there wasn't
any chance of Kwannon getting any closer to Alpha, they rebelled
emotionally. It doesn't matter how conclusively you prove anything, if
the person to whom you prove it can't accept your proof emotionally,
it's still false. N