The senator looked at Candron. "The thing I don't understand is, why was it necessary to knock out Ch'ien? He'll have a sore jaw for weeks. Why didn't you just tell him who you were and what you were up to?" Candron glanced at Taggert, but Taggert just grinned and nodded. "We couldn't allow that," said Candron, looking at Senator Kerotski. "Dr. James Ch'ien has too much of a logical, scientific mind for that. We'd have ruined him if he'd seen me in action." The senator looked a little surprised. "Why? We've convinced other scientists that they were mistaken in their observations. Why not Ch'ien?" "Ch'ien is too good a scientist," Candron said. "He's not the type who would refuse to believe something he saw simply because it didn't agree with his theories. Ch'ien is one of those dangerous in-betweens. He's too brilliant to be allowed to go to waste, and, at the same time, too rigid to change his manner of thinking. If he had seen me teleport or levitate, he wouldn't reject it--he'd try to explain it. And that would have effectively ruined him." "Ruined him?" The senator looked a little puzzled. Taggert raised his heavy head from the couch. "Sure, Leo," he said to the senator. "Don't you see? We _need_ Ch'ien on this interstellar project. He absolutely _must_ dope out the answer somehow, and no one else can do it as quickly." "With the previous information," the senator said, "we would have been able to continue." "Yeah?" Taggert said, sitting up. "Has anyone been able to dope out Fermat's Last Theorem without Fermat? No. So why ruin Ch'ien?" "It would ruin him," Candron broke in, before the senator could speak. "If he saw, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that levitation and teleportation were possible, he would have accepted his own senses as usable data on definite phenomena. But, limited as he is by his scientific outlook, he would have tried to evolve a scientific theory to explain what he saw. What else could a scientist _do_?" Senator Kerotski nodded, and his nod said: "I see. He would have diverted his attention from the field of the interstellar drive to the field of psionics. And he would have wasted years trying to explain an inherently nonlogical area of knowledge by logical means." "That's right," Candron said. "We would have set him off on a wild goose chase, trying to solve the problems of psionics by the scientific, the logical, method. We would have presented him with an unsolvable problem." Taggert patted his knees. "We would have given him a problem that he could not solve with the methodology at hand. It would be as though we had proved to an ancient Greek philosopher that the cube _could_ be doubled, and then allowed him to waste his life trying to do it with a straight-edge and compass."