For a timeless time I lay stunned, immured now as the massive stones of Bar-Ponderone had never confined me. My basic self-awareness still survived, out was shunted aside, cut off from any contact with the body itself. With shadowy fingers of imagination I clawed at the walls surrounding me, fought for a glimpse of light, for a way out. And found none. * * * * * Then, at last, I began again to think. I must analyze my awareness of my surroundings, seek out channels through which impulses from sensory nerves flowed, and tap them. I tried cautiously; an extension of my self-concept reached out with ultimate delicacy. There were the ranked infinities of cells, there the rushing torrents of gross fluid, there the taut cables of the interconnecting web, and there-- Barrier! Blank and impregnable, the wall reared up. My questing tendril of self-stuff raced over the surface like an ant over a melon, and found no tiniest fissure. It loomed alien, inscrutable: the invader who had stolen my brain. I withdrew. To dissipate my force was senseless. I must select a point of attack, hurl against it all the power of my surviving identity ... before it too dwindled away and the abstraction that was Legion vanished forevermore. The last of the phantom emotions that had clung--for how long?--to the incorporeal mind field had faded now, leaving me with no more than an intellectual determination to reassert myself. Dimly I recognized this sign of my waning sense of identity but there was no surge of instinctive fear. Instead I coolly assessed my resources--and almost at once stumbled into an unused channel, here within my own self-field. For a moment I recoiled from the outré configuration of the stored patterns ... and then I remembered. I had been in the water, struggling, while the Red soldier waited, rifle aimed. And then: a flood of data, flowing with cold, impersonal precision. And I had deftly marshalled the forces of my body to survive. And once more: as I hung by numbed fingers under the cornice of the Yordano Building, the cold voice had spoken. And I had forgotten. The miracle had been pushed back, rejected by the conscious mind. But now I knew: this was the knowledge that I had received from the background briefing device that I had used in my island strong-room before I fled. This was the survival data known to all Old Vallonians of the days of the Two Worlds. It had lain here, unused, the secrets of superhuman strength and endurance ... buried by the imbecile of censor-self's aversion to the alien. But the ego alone remained now, stripped of the burden of neurosis, freed from subconscious pressures. The levels of the mind were laid bare, and I saw close at hand the regions where dreams were born, the barren sources of instinctive fear-patterns, the linkages to blinding emotions; and all lay now under my overt control.