In other words, I contend that I simply did what any other good detective story writer tries to do--mislead the reader without lying to him. Agatha Christie's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," for instance, uses the device of telling the story from the murderer's viewpoint, in the first person, without revealing that he _is_ the murderer. Likewise, John Dickson Carr, in his "Nine Wrong Answers" finds himself forced to deny that he has lied to the reader, although he admits that one of his characters certainly lied. Both Carr and Christie told the absolute truth--within the framework of the story--and left it to the reader to delude himself. It all depends on the viewpoint. The statement, "We all liked Father Goodheart very much" means one thing when said by a member of his old parish in the United States, which he left to become a missionary. It means something else again when uttered by a member of the tribe of cannibals which the good Father attempted unsuccessfully to convert. Similarly, such terms as "the gulf between the worlds," "the new world," and "the known universe" have one meaning to a science-fictioneer, and another to a historian. Semantics, anyone? In Chapter Ten, right at the beginning, there is a conversation between Commander Frank and Frater Vincent, and "agent of the Assembly" (read: _priest_). If the reader will go back over that section, keeping in mind the fact that what they are "actually" talking about are the Catholic Church and the Christian religion _as seen from the viewpoint of a couple of fanatically devout Sixteenth Century Spaniards_, he will understand the method I used in presenting the whole story. Let me quote: "Mentally, the commander went through the symbol-patterns that he had learned as a child--the symbol-patterns that brought him into direct contact with the Ultimate Power, the Power that controlled not only the spinning of atoms and the whirling of electrons in their orbits, but the workings of probability itself." Obviously, he is reciting the _Pater Noster_ and the _Ave Maria_. The rest of the sentence is self-explanatory. So is the following: "Once indoctrinated into the teachings of the Universal Assembly, any man could tap that power to a greater or lesser degree, depending on his mental control and ethical attitude. At the top level, a first-class adept could utilize that Power for telepathy, psychokinesis, levitation, teleportation, and other powers that the commander only vaguely understood." It doesn't matter whether _you_ believe in the miracles attributed to many of the Saints; Pizarro certainly did. His faith in that Power was as certain as the modern faith in the power of the atomic bomb.