"All right again," Iimmi said. "And I'll even assume that Jordde knew that the two impulses of this experience were one--something terrible and confused, like seeing ten men hacked to pieces by vampires, or seeing a film of a little boy getting his tongue pulled out, or coming through what we came through since we landed on Aptor; and two--something calm and ordered, like the beach and the sea. Now, why would he want to kill someone simply because they might have gone through what amounts, I guess, to the basic religious experience?" "You picked just the right word," Geo smiled. "Now, Jordde was a novice in the not too liberal religion of Argo. Jordde and Snake had been through nearly as much on Aptor as we had. And they survived. And they also emerged from that jungle of horror onto that great arcing rhythm of waves and sand. And they went through just what you and I and Argo went through. Little Argo, I mean. And it was just at that point when the blind priestesses of Argo made contact with Jordde. They did so by means of those vision screens we saw them with, which can receive sound and pictures from just about any place, but can also project, at least sound, to just about anywhere too. In other words, right in the middle of this religious, or mystic, or whatever you want to call it, experience, a voice materialized out of thin air that claimed to the voice of The Goddess. Have you any idea what this did to his mind?" "I imagine it took all the real significance out of the whole thing," Iimmi said. "It would for me." "It did," said Geo. "Jordde wasn't what you'd call stable before that. If anything, this made him more so. It also stopped his mental functioning from working in the normal way. And Snake who was reading his mind at the time, suddenly saw himself watching the terrifying sealing up process of an active and competent, if not healthy, mind. He saw it again in Urson. It's apparently a pretty stiff thing to watch. That's why he stopped reading Urson's thoughts. The idea of stealing the jewels for himself was slowly eating away Urson's balance, the understanding, the ability to reconcile disparities, like the incident with the blue lizard, things like that, all of which were signs we didn't get. Snake contacted Hama by telepathy, almost accidentally. And Hama was something to hold onto for the boy." "Still, why did Jordde want to kill anybody who had experienced this, voice of God and all?"