"I have reason to know that," Ketrik said. "But, Mark, I still fail to see this danger you spoke of."
"I'm getting to it. And this is the part that's frightening. About a month ago, in my own home, I set up a secret Cerebro-Scanner. Know what that is?"
"Never heard of it."
"It's new, and plenty dangerous in the wrong hands. Works on a ray principle. Produces elaborate graphs of an individual's mental and emotional co-ordinates. Well, on a secret wave-length I probed the minds of my fellow Council Members!" Mark smiled. "Yes, I'd probably receive sentence of death if they knew, but the end justified the means. Ketrik, the resulting graphs reveal that the cerebro-thalamic co-ordinates of the Council Members do not vary in the slightest! They are the same down to ten decimal points!"
Ketrik gestured helplessly. "Is this important?"
Mark stared at him. "Important—it's unprecedented! Much the same as finding eleven identical sets of fingerprints! But what is worse, the graphs show elements of—of—it's hard to explain. Certainly not disloyalty! Rather the opposite. An intense loyalty, but governed by unreason. Their minds seem directed along a single channel, toward a definite end. And that is—the utter humbling of Perlac! Nothing else seems to matter!"
Ketrik nodded. Then he asked the obvious question.
"Did you employ this Scanner on yourself?"
"To make the record complete—yes! Needless to say, this tenacity of purpose concerning Perlac is utterly missing from my own mental co-ordinates."
"Hmm. How do you account for that?"