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 creation of alternate worlds by the Probability Engine changes all that." Prim's thought beat at Oktav. "Can it be that the underlying logic of our procedure has somehow always escaped you? From our vantage point we observe the world as it rides into the cone of the future--a cone that always narrows towards the present, because in the remote future there are many major possibilities still realizable, in the near future only a relative few. We note the approach of crucial epochs, when the world must make some great choice, as between democracy and totalitarianism, managerialism and servicism, benevolent elitism and enforced equalism and so on. Then, carefully choosing the right moment and focussing the Probability Engine chiefly upon the minds of the world's leaders, we widen the cone of the future. Two or more major possibilities are then realized instead of just one. Time is bifurcated, or trifurcated. We have alternate worlds, at first containing many objects and people in common, but diverging more and more--bifurcating more and more completely--as the consequences of the alternate decisions make themselves felt." * * * * *