Yet it came slowly and painfully, as if he had just tried to understand after one reading the Cranmor-Frasher Theory of Diminishing Corelatives. As he verbalized the conclusion two things happened--the drug-like languor in his muscles began to disperse and the shrilling note of terror burst up loud in his mind once more. Two of the men brought their last victim back from the fire and laid his body on the stones close to Dirrul. Dirrul feigned sleep when they stood over him. One of them prodded him with the tip of a dusty boot--then they both laughed. They went back to the fire and talked soundlessly to their companions, holding up the identification disk which had been ripped from Dirrul's neck hours before. That amused them briefly, until one of the three snatched the disk and hurled it toward the mouth of the ravine in violent anger. The three men pulled thick white skins together near the fire and crept into them. Dirrul waited until he was sure they slept. It was the only chance he would have to escape, but when he tried to creep away his hands collapsed from sheer terror. The crying fear in his mind was so loud his head seemed to vibrate physically with the sound. Thought was impossible. Judgment and decision were impossible. If he tried to consider even a problem as simple as the safest means of passing the dying fire--reason failed him. He could weigh nothing critically--he could not consider probable courses of rational action. Nonetheless he inched forward. It took all the courage and stamina he possessed. Gradually a strange and foggy understanding formed in his brain. The terror seemed to die if he planned nothing, merely responding without thought to the instinctive urge to escape. Let instinct do the trick then. Detached from the control panel of his cerebral cortex his body mechanism functioned perfectly. It was like a space-ship smoothly piloted by its automatic navigators. Dirrul gave himself over to his own built-in stimulus-response relays and the screeching fear shriveled and died. Calm and unhurried he walked past the fire and the sleeping men. As calmly he searched the mouth of the ravine for Sorgel's disk. When he found it he stuffed it into the pocket of his tunic and strode confidently along the trail that led down from the hills. It was dawn. In the pink morning light he could see the Vininese city at his feet, neat, clean, well-blocked streets and towering buildings of black stone. On the outskirts were the circular space-fields and the long low flat-roofed interplanetary freight depots. Farther away, dotting the countryside at regular intervals, were curious block-shaped windowless structures surrounded by double walls. Dirrul had never seen anything like them before but, through a process of judicial elimination, he decided they must be the Vininese Beam Transmitters. The defense of Vinin was remarkably thorough, far surpassing anything of a similar nature on Agron.