"Impossible!"
"True, nevertheless. So, before we land, you'd better give them to me, so that I can send them to a bank for you, under guard."
"If I land." As Kinnison spoke Illona's manner changed; darkened as though an inner light had been extinguished. "You have been so friendly and nice, I was forgetting where I am and the business ahead. Putting it off won't make it any easier. Better be getting on with it, don't you think?"
"Oh, that? That's all done, long ago."
"What?" she almost screamed. "It isn't! It couldn't be!"
"Sure. I got most of the stuff I wanted last night, while I was changing your thought-screen battery. Menjo Bleeko, your big-shot boss, and so on."
"You didn't! But ... you must have, at that, to know it. You didn't hurt me, or anything. You couldn't have operated—changed me—because I have all my memories—or seem to. I'm not an idiot, I mean any more than usual—"
"You've been taught a good many sheer lies, and quite a few half-truths," he informed her, evenly. "For instance, what did they tell you that hollow tooth would do to you when you broke the seal?"
"Make my mind a blank. But one of their doctors would get hold of me very soon and give me the antidote that would restore me exactly as I was before."
"That is one of the half-truths. It would certainly have made your mind a blank, but only by blasting nine-tenths of your memory files out of existence. Their therapists would 'restore' you by substituting other memories for your own—whatever other ones they pleased."