Second Stage Lensman by E. E. (Doc) Smith Page B

bank for you, under guard."
    "If I land." As Kinnison spoke Illona's manner changed; darkened as though an inner light had been extinguished. "You have been so friendly and nice, I was forgetting where I am and the business ahead. Putting it off won't make it any easier. Better be getting on with it, don't you think?"
    "Oh, that? That's all done, long ago."
    "What?" she almost screamed. "It isn't! It couldn't be!"
    "Sure. I got most of the stuff I wanted last night, while I was changing your thought-screen battery. Menjo Bleeko, your big-shot boss, and so on."
    "You didn't! But… you must have, at that, to know it… but you didn't hurt me, or anything… you couldn't have operated—changed me, because I have all my memories… or seem to… I'm not an idiot, I mean any more than usual…"
    "You've been taught a good many sheer lies, and quite a few half truths," he informed her, evenly. "For instance, what did they tell you that hollow tooth would do to you when you broke the seal?"
    "Make my mind a blank. But one of their doctors would get hold of me very soon and give me the antidote that would restore me exactly as I was before."
    "That is one of the half truths. It would certainly have made your mind a blank, but only by blasting most of your memory files out of existence. Their therapists would 'restore' you by substituting other memories for your real ones—whatever other ones they pleased."
    "How horrible! How perfectly ghastly! That was why you treated it so, then; as though it were a snake. I wondered at your savagery toward it. But how, really, do I know that you are telling the truth?"
    "You don't," he admitted. "You will have to make your own decisions after acquiring full information."
    "You are a therapist," she remarked, shrewdly. "But if you operated on my mind you didn't 'save' me, because I still think exactly the same as I always did about the Patrol and everything pertaining to it… or do I?… Or is this…" her eyes widened with a startling possibility.
    "No, I didn't operate," he assured her. "No such operation can possibly be done without leaving scars—breaks in the memory chains—that you can find in a minute if you look for them. There are no breaks or blanks in any chain in your mind."
    "No—at least, I can't find any," she reported after a few minutes' thought. "But why didn't you? You can't turn me loose this way, you know—a z… an enemy of your society."
    "You don't need saving," he grinned. "You believe in absolute good and absolute evil, don't you?"
    "Why of course—certainly! Everybody must!"
    "Not necessarily. Some of the greatest thinkers in the universe do not." His voice grew somber, then lightened again. "Such being the case, however, all you need to 'save' yourself is experience, observation, and knowledge of both sides of the question. You're a colossal little fraud, you know."
    "How do you mean?" She blushed vividly, her eyes wavered.
    "Pretending to be such a hard-boiled egg. 'Never broke yet'. Why should you break, when you've never been under pressure?"
    "I have so!" she flared. "What do you suppose I'm carrying this knife for?"
    "Oh, that." He mentally shrugged the wicked little dagger aside as he pondered. "You little lamb in wolfs clothing… but at that, your memories may, I think, be altogether too valuable to monkey with… there's something funny about this whole matrix—damned funny. Come clean, baby-face—why?"
    "They told me to," she admitted, wriggling slightly. "To act tough—really tough. As though I were an adventuress who had been everywhere and had done… done everything. That the worse I acted the better I would get along in your Civilization."
    "I suspected something of the sort. And what did you zwil—excuse me, you folks—go to Lyrane for, in the first place?"
    "I don't know. From chance remarks I gathered that we were to land on one of the planets—any one, I supposed—and wait for somebody."
    "What were you, personally, going to do?"
    "I