"How horrible! How perfectly ghastly! That was why you treated it so, then; as though it were a snake. I wondered at your savagery toward it. But how, really, do I know that you are telling the truth?"
"You don't," he admitted. "You will have to make your own decisions after acquiring full information."
"You are a therapist," she remarked, shrewdly. "But if you operated upon my mind you didn't 'save' me, because I still think exactly the same as I always did about the Patrol and everything pertaining to it—or do I? Or is this—" Her eyes widened with a startling possibility.
"No, I didn't operate," he assured her. "No such operation can possibly be done without leaving scars—breaks in the memory chains—that you can find in a minute if you look for them. There are no breaks or blanks in any chain in your mind."
"No—at least, I can't find any," she reported after a few minutes' thought. "But why didn't you? You can't turn me loose this way, you know—a z ... an enemy of your society."
"You don't need saving," he grinned. "You believe in absolute good and absolute evil, don't you?"
"Why, of course—certainly! Everybody must!"
"Not necessarily. Some of the greatest thinkers in the Universe do not." His voice grew somber, then lightened again. "Such being the case, however, all that you need to 'save' yourself is experience, observation and knowledge of both sides of the question. You're a colossal little fraud, you know."
"How do you mean?" She blushed vividly, her eyes wavered.
"Pretending to be such a hard-boiled egg. 'Never broke yet.' Why should you have broken, when you have never been under pressure?"