"Look, father," said Ilon, indicating the machines. "I perform my assigned tasks here. Those only. I supervise the ithilyn mines, watching their daily output through the scanner."
Suddenly a greenish glowing swam through the open air, like the rays of a fairy elfin, settling around the room.
The older man gasped. "It's the spy-rays of the minions, son! Whatever you've been doing, son, blank your mind as I do. When they're gone, we'll go into this foolish thing you've been doing."
So they stood at the scanner and inspected the scenes of the lower ithilyn mines. As Ilon's hands moved the controls, various scenes shifted before them. In the headquarters room, other men such as himself raised their heads, smiled and saluted, or answered direct personal questions.
They came to the digging scenes. Huge giants toiled in a deep hole, like larval bodies in cocoons. Rest-time had come. Food had been shuttled in on a chain of grav-belts. Now the great fingerless hand of the giant reached down, felt around expertly, and picked up the food shuttles. The great eye in his forehead did not waver, for the giant was blind. Yet the hand, misformed now into a digging claw, threw the food expertly into the huge, gaping maw and the jaws began to chew with animal-like gusto.
Then the elfin glowing was gone. Nyo Karth spun accusingly upon his son.
"Ilon—my son, my son," he cried in a softly troubled thought tone. "Have you forgotten, boy, that after all you have a father? And a friend? Have you forgotten the person to whom you took all your troubles to as a lad?"
Ilon Karth frowned, still averting his eyes. "But I'm a man now, father, faced with the problems of a man of the upper Galax."
"True, true, son, but—"
"And if the conventions of an age-old universal society bore me to death, father, then it's—"