"You've heard the expression, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em...?"
"Sure, but...."
"But suppose you can't join 'em, either?" Rowley laughed, excitedly. "You make like something they want to protect!... Know anything about dryads, Commander?"
Spliid snorted. "Supernatural creatures that live in trees? Dryads don't exist!"
"Neither do the people of Hume."
Spliid looked at him in such a way Rowley felt his sanity was being weighed.
"Suppose you were a native of Hume, and some alien beings came along. You could read their minds. You'd know right off they wouldn't recognize you as a life-form like themselves. They might move right in and destroy you without knowing it, and you would be unable to defend yourself. That was actually the situation on Hume, and we were the aliens. So the natives pretended they were a type of life-form we want to protect."
"How was it done?" Spliid wanted to know.
"Mental projection. After the directors of the play read our minds, they tried to reproduce what they found there. They slipped on the points I mentioned, because those things meant little or nothing to them. But they were enough to rob the play of its semblance of reality.