"I know that now, because I've made the reorientation myself. I didn't then. The rational mind is the only integrating factor in the chaos of the universe--Juan told me that. It is literally true. Mind creates the universe by interpreting it." She put her hand in Lanny's and looked up at the stars patterning the void of night. "I wish I might say that to my people and have them understand; but the clatter of our machines closes us in. Our world will die in violence and madness, the way the skyport died tonight. We may be able to help the survivors afterward; we can do nothing now." "But we must do it now," Lanny persisted stubbornly. "We don't want revenge, Tak Laleen; we've outgrown our reason for that." "Can you teach my people any differently than you learned yourself? It took an invasion and twenty years of imprisonment before you were able to break free from your old patterns of thinking." "But you did it in a day." "In the beginning, your teachers didn't know what their goal was; they only knew they had a problem and it had to be solved. I came in at the end, when their job was nearly finished and they were pretty sure where they were headed. That's why it was so easy for me." "And your world does that, too." Gill fingered his lip. "The trouble is, Lanny, it isn't simply a matter of giving them the facts. To us they are obvious, but you saw what happened to the governor. How can we make a man believe a new truth, when it means giving up all the science he has always believed?" "We failed with the governor because we threw the end result in his face without giving him a logical reason to accept it." Tak Laleen shook her head. "And so we're back where we started. We have to let my world fall apart before we can save it." She moved impatiently toward the door. "This building is a tomb. I want to walk on the soil and smell the wind and taste the energy of the earth." * * * * * In an uncomfortable silence they left the government building. Gill integrated with the power in the lift, and they rode the elevator to the ground level. As the cage slid past the empty floors, Gill broke the silence abruptly. "If all we want is to prevent chaos on your world, Tak Laleen, it won't be hard. We'll just go through with the treaty we intended to offer to the governor. We can put things back as they were and go on delivering resources to the Almost-men. The only people who know the truth will be our prisoners. We can keep them out of sight and ourselves play at being Almost-men to satisfy any tourists who come to the skyport." "We'll have to do that for a while, until we work out something better; but it's only a stopgap. We have a problem," Lanny said doggedly. "We know it can be solved, because it has been for ourselves and for Tak Laleen. All we have to find is the method."