"And you're stuck with it. I knew it would happen. That's why I didn't use you and leave your memory blank; with your head working on my side, you'll be useful." Benton knew when he had something. "That'll work two ways," he said. "First I want you to dive inside my skull and tell me something. I'm holding out for a bargain, you know. What is the bargain?" * * * * * As he spoke, Benton concentrated upon the problem of reasoning out the location of Urei's sub-cosmic converter. He didn't have far to go for an answer. A few years ago somebody had noticed a radiation leak on one side of the power-house, near a spot where the power cables came through the walls of the massive building. Now it happened that there were taps from those cables, less than a hundred yards away. That made it likely that the converter had been placed somewhere before the taps. The only place that could be would be either inside the power-house or inside the wall itself. Therefore Urei had caused the repairmen and technicians to place his machine inside the very wall they had been reinforcing. In no other way could it have escaped notice and investigation. "I can't read it if you don't think about it," Urei complained; "you guessed right about the converter, though." Benton nodded. "Then last night you didn't get anything from me at all?" If a disembodied voice can sound shamefaced, Urei's did. "All right, so I lied; but you annoyed me with your stubbornness." "Ah. Thalamic reactions." "I've been in bad company," Urei defended. "What I wanted from you was the assurance that the people of the Eastern Alliance were essentially the same as the humans I've met. I had to know if their reactions to my manipulations would be similar, before I acted. Most of the stuff I've been able to read about them led me to believe they were entirely different. If so, I couldn't be sure of results." "They're similar, of course," Benton said. "They differ only in that they have been indoctrinated to believe a lot of things which aren't so. So have we, for that matter--to a different degree and on different subjects. But essentially we're the same species of animal and react alike to stimuli. But you didn't get that information from me, eh?"