"If you insist," he said, "I'll try it. But you won't understand it."

The Ruler frowned. "We shall understand," he said. "Begin. Who governs you?"

"None," Korvin said.

"But you are governed?"

Korvin nodded. "Yes."

"Then there is a governor," the Ruler insisted.

"True," Korvin said. "But everyone is the governor."

"Then there is no government," the Ruler said. "There is no single decision."

"No," Korvin said equably, "there are many decisions binding on all."

"Who makes them binding?" the Ruler asked. "Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?"

"Many of them are unfavorable," Korvin said. "But we are not forced to accept them."

"Do you act against your own interests?"

Korvin shrugged. "Not knowingly," he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. "I told you you wouldn't understand it," he said.

"It is a defect in your explanation," the Ruler almost snarled.

"My explanation is as exact as it can be," he said.

The Ruler breathed gustily. "Let us try something else," he said. "Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples—"

"Neither have we," Korvin said. "We are all individuals, 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.