He listened to Guantra bluster, calling out to him to recall and act on their old friendship. Smiling grimly, he leaned closer to the image on the screen. Test him, Kortha! "Let me broadcast to all Mars, Guantra. Let me tell Mars that we are friends." "No," said Guantra swiftly. "That would not be politic right now. Better that you and I should meet, Kortha. Come aboard my flagship." Afraid of what he might say, the Premier would not let him speak to Mars. Kortha wanted to know the reason why Guantra doubted their friendship. Looking at the cold austerity, the pride and ambition of the man as marked in the lines of his face and the manner of his bearing, Kortha rather thought the reason was not Ilse. A man like Guantra would not bother so about a woman. "I will broadcast, Guantra," Kortha said slowly. "No. I will have to stop that, my friend. I cannot allow it, until I have seen and spoken with you, face to face. I am coming in for you now." They saw the Premier reach out and break connection. Kortha looked at the blank screen; he whirled on Ilse, and his big hands went out to catch her by the shoulders and bring her up close to him. He said savagely, "Tell me! Tell me what I don't know. Why has Guantra turned against me? Why does he doubt my friendship? It can't be over you. He is not the man to endanger his power for a woman. What is his reason?" Her blue eyes were unafraid. She said, "Guantra was never your friend. I dared not tell you before, but I can now because you have doubts of what your memory tells you. You saw how indecisive he was. He does not know whether his psychoanalyser in the Blue Grotto had time to change you. I got you out of there before he knew, before he had seen and spoken with you." The giant released her; ran fingers that shook a little through the thick mop of his yellow hair, frowning. "I don't understand. What psychoanalyser? What Blue Grotto? Wait--I remember the grotto, with the blue sea. But the rest is strange to me." "And the room fitted with drapes? The couch with the ocemar pelts?" "I slept there." * * * * * She told him then, hurriedly: of how the psychoanalyser was one of the machines Guantra had taken from the tower of Zut in Yassa and set it up in his hidden lair, and how he used it to turn key men into his friends by giving them new memories that were so closely linked with their old that rarely were they so much as hesitant about them. Only Kortha doubted, and that was because Ilse had come to him before Guantra. She picked up the thread of his life at the smithy in the desert and went on with it. Once he interrupted, with, "But it was Hurlgut who sent men to kill me in the tower of Zut?" Ilse scorned that, "Hurlgut send men? Who on Mars would serve a cripple when Guantra rules the fleets? Would Hurlgut hide in Ruuzol if he could put his banners in the air?"