into the arena. The Terms stood shriveled, mute. Starza was fumbling at the base of the statue, and he said in a thick horrible voice, "Look." The loudspeaker. The coiled wiring.

The Terms stirred.

Starza leaped to the lap of the statue. He bawled, "Listen! This is sacrilege! You have been victims of a hoax—"

Not listening, they filed in silent groups out of the arena. Their antennae were the color of ashes. Starza jumped down. He pounded after them. He was shouting at Los Tichnat.

"I know," Tichnat droned. He kept walking. "You are right. It does not matter that you are right. The Queen-Mother called."

"Listen," Starza mouthed. "It was a fraud, a trick. You can't—"

"We must." Tichnat paused. For a long moment the great faceted eyes stared somberly. "It was a splendid dream, the thing you offered us. But this is the final reality. And yours is but a dream."

He tramped stolidly on, after the others. The council hall door closed.

Starza clawed at the door. It opened. He was too late. They sat silently around the great table, the faceted eyes dead, the antennae coruscating indigo, now green, now rose. Communion. The meshing of minds. Starza shouted at them. Stillness.

Starza looked blindly at me. He was shaking. "Carmody," he said. "Carmody knows the Term mind. He can do something. Come on," he said.

We found Carmody in his quarters, methodically packing. His eyebrows rose as we burst in. "Did you gentlemen ever try knocking?"

Starza just looked at him. Carmody drew a long breath. "You'll find my resignation on your desk, Dave."

"Ah?" Starza's voice was very soft.

"It's only a question of time," Carmody said. "Call it the rat deserting the ship if you like, but I'm through."

Starza was smiling, a fat man's smile. "So you really think you can pull it off," he whispered.

Carmody shrugged, and Starza calmly took out a sonic pistol and shot him in the belly.

A sonic blast hemorrhages. It rends the capillaries, ploughs the flesh into a flaccid collection of shattered nerve fibers and ruined arteries. It's a rotten way to die.

Starza watched Carmody thrash himself to death on the floor. I turned away.

"For the record, Jake, he made a full confession. We both heard him."

"Just for the record," I said.

"It had to be him," Starza said. "That thoughtcaster blast yesterday morning made reference to your study on the Term. Only Harvey and Carmody knew about that. It couldn't have been Harvey. He cut his throat this morning.

"I've decided," Starza said. "This is a Type L planet, after all. The natives are chronically unstable. Hostile, in fact. Pursuant to Solar Regulation 3, we have the right to enforce martial law. It should be six months before an investigation. Meanwhile—"

"We'll get production," I said.

"We'll get production." He wiped his forehead, relaxed. "I'll send in a full report tonight. Better turn in, Jake," he said kindly. "I'll need you in the morning."

I turned in.

You lie awake, staring into the blackness. It gnaws.

My head throbbed. I should have felt a triumphant relief, but I could not remember my axioms, and I felt a sick dull hate for the thing the Guild spy Carmody had done to me. What happens when you strip a man of everything he believes in?

He remembers other things.

Those memories came trooping back like ghosts and I fought them, sweating, but they came. Once upon a time, there was a starry-eyed young engineer who started out to set the galaxy on fire. But he got squeamish, somewhere along the way. So Carmody operated on him. Carmody did things to his brain, made a good production man out of him.

I remembered now.

That time I had argued with Starza about standards, nine years ago. And I had resigned. And Starza sent me to