She had just given him his chance, if he kept his head and played it right. In her wholly mistaken, if quite natural, deduction of his origin, she had given him a chance for escape.
She misread his silence. "Further lies will not do you any good." Astonishingly, there was pity in her voice. "I see now what you intended. You wished to share your community's knowledge with other tribes, to give them new weapons in their fight against us. And now you hope still to keep your secret, so someone else may succeed where you failed. Believe me, Price, I understand—"
"Do you?" he said savagely.
"Yes," she said, her voice hardening. "And I understand better than you what would have happened to your army if they had attacked, armed with pitiful little planes like yours and only slightly more powerful rifles." She spoke swiftly to the guard outside, and then snapped at Price, "Come, I want to show you something."
She led Price out between the green-clad guards. They went down the echoing corridor of the cell-block, and into a lift that took them swooping up a long way, and then into another corridor and eventually into a medium-sized room circular in shape, completely surrounded by a double row of screens. The lower screens gave a fixed view of the terrain within eyeshot of the Citadel itself. The upper screens reflected a roving, ever-shifting view of the remoter Belt, the woods and prairies, herds of wild cattle grazing, deer bounding with their white flags up, the lonely starships waiting on their isolated fields. Four men in uniforms of dull gold watched the screens and checked a series of clicking recorders. Beneath each screen was a battery of studs.
"You see how much chance you would have of approaching unseen? And do you see what would happen to an army? One man here, touching those firing studs, and the whole Belt would become in seconds like the barren outside the walls. Nothing would be left. Nothing."
In Linna's eyes now there was the same impatient contempt for his stupidity that he had seen there before, when Arrin had talked to Sawyer in the square.
"And this is how you would help them—to their destruction."
If the situation had been what she imagined it to be, that would have been the truth. Price allowed a sullen doubtfulness to show in his face. But he said,
"What about your starships? You wouldn't destroy them."