"It will not be permitted," thought Prim. "You have already spent too much time in the world, Oktav. Although you are the youngest of us, your body is senile."

Before he could check himself, or at least avoid projection, Oktav thought, "Yes, and by so doing I have learned much that you, in your snug retreat, would do well to become aware of."

"The world and its emotions have corrupted you," thought Prim. "And that brings me to the second and major point of our complaint."

Oktav felt the seven minds converge hostilely upon him. Careful to mask his ideational processes, Oktav probed the others for possible sympathy or weakness. Lack of a talisman put him at a great disadvantage. His hopes fell.

Prim thought, "It has come to our attention that you have been telling secrets. Moved by some corrupt emotionality, and under the astounding primitive guise of fortunetelling, you have been disbursing forbidden knowledge—cloudily perhaps, but none the less unequivocally—to earthlings of the main-trunk world."

"I do not deny it," thought Oktav, crossing his Rubicon. "The main-trunk world needs to know more. It has been your spoiled brat. And as often happens to a spoiled brat, you now push it, unprepared and unaided, into a dubious future."

Prim's answering thought, amplified by his talisman, thundered in the measureless dark. "We are the best judges of what is good for the world. Our minds are dedicated far more selflessly than yours to the world's welfare, and we have chosen the only sound scientific method for insuring its continued and ultimate happiness. One of the unalterable conditions of that method is that no Earthling have the slightest concrete hint of our activities. Has your mind departed so far from scientific clarity—influenced perhaps by bodily decay due to injudicious exposure to space-time—that I must recount to you our purpose and our rules?"

The darkness pulsed. Oktav projected no answering thought. Prim continued, thinking in a careful step-by-step way, as if for a child.

"No scientific experiment is possible without controls—set-ups in which the conditions are unaltered, as a comparison, in order to gauge the exact effects of the alteration. There is, under natural conditions, only one world. Hence no experiments can be performed upon it. One can never test scientifically which form of social organization, government, and so forth, is best for it. But the 

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