"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever could." "I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking. The stealing is the most important thing a man can do." * * * * * Rita the Record-Keeper nodded. "Because you steal things Mankind needs in order to live. You steal things that the Female Society can make into food, clothing and weapons for Mankind, so that Mankind can live and flourish." He saw the way, saw what was expected of him. "No," he contradicted her. "That's not why we steal. We live on what we steal, but we do not steal just to go on living." "Why?" she asked blandly, as if she didn't know the answer better than any other member of the tribe. "Why do we steal? What is more important than survival?" Here it was now. The catechism. "_To hit back at the Monsters_," he began. "_To drive them from the planet, if we can. Regain Earth for Mankind, if we can. But, above all, hit back at the Monsters...._" He ploughed through the long verbal ritual, pausing at the end of each part, so that the Record-Keeper could ask the proper question and initiate the next sequence. She tried to trip him once. She reversed the order of the fifth and sixth questions. Instead of "_What will we do with the Monsters when we have regained the Earth from them?_" she asked, "_Why can't we use the Monsters' own Alien-Science to fight the Monsters?_" Carried along by mental habit, Eric was well into the passage beginning "_We will keep them as our ancestors kept all strange animals, in a place called a zoo, or we will drive them into our burrows and force them to live as we have lived_," before he realized the switch and stopped in confusion. Then he got a grip on himself, sought the right answer in his memory with calmness, as his uncle's wives had schooled him to do, and began again. "_There are three reasons why we cannot ever use Alien-Science_," he recited, holding up his hand with the thumb and little finger closed. "_Alien-Science is non-human, Alien-Science is inhuman, Alien-Science is anti-human. First, since it is non-human_," he closed his forefinger, "_we cannot use it because we can never understand it. And because it is inhuman, we would never want to use it even if we could understand it. And because it is anti-human and can only be used to hurt and damage Mankind, we would not be able to use it so long as we remain human ourselves. Alien-Science is the opposite of Ancestor-Science in every way, ugly instead of beautiful, hurtful instead of helpful. When we die, Alien-Science would not bring us to the world of our ancestors, but to another world full of Monsters._" * * * * * All in all, it went very well, despite the trap into which he had almost fallen.