"She's wasn't lying," Lanny said. "She understood more than we did ourselves. Maybe Juan told her—"

The governor laughed and motioned with his gun. "Will you join her, or do you want to force me to spoil your pretty illusion?"

Gill walked unhurriedly toward the desk. "You must listen to us. Fire the gun, if you insist on that much proof. We want to save your world, not destroy it."

The governor backed toward the open wall panel. "Stand where you are, or I'll fire!"

"Just give us a chance to explain—"

"The whole business is drivel. Superstitious nonsense. No man can violate the established laws of science."

"Why not, since men made the laws originally?"

The shell of dignity in the governor's manner began to crack away, revealing the naked hysteria that lay beneath. Gill moved again. The governor punched the firing stud of his energy gun. The fire lashed harmlessly at Gill's chest.

"It's a lie!" the governor screamed. He fired the gun again at Lanny; then at Gill. His mouth quivered with terror. He was an intelligent man; he looked upon the evidence of a fact that overturned everything he believed. In the clamor of a dying city, still throbbing far below his open wall panel, he heard the testimony of the same discord. He lost his rational world in the chaos, and he hadn't the ability to find another.

For a moment the governor stood looking at the half-naked giants he had been unable to kill. Then he flung the weapon away and leaped through the open panel into the mechanical clatter of the dying city.

"Once I wouldn't have cared," Gill told his brother. "Now I do. Lanny, must we destroy their world in spite of ourselves?"

They heard a faint voice behind them. "Not all of us, Gill." The brothers turned. They saw Tak Laleen, dressed again in the white uniform of the missionary. She came slowly through the metal panel of a door.

"You see, it is possible for us to learn," she said when she stood within the room. "I have."

"Then all your people—"

"Not all of them. A few, if they're fortunate."

"You did it, Tak Laleen; most of our older survivors haven't."

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