"Not realizing that those have lost their value, now that all aircraft are grounded," said Relez with a smile. "It might work. And overcoming the suspicions may prove easier than you think, when men begin to meet each other under the open sky, and realize that their hates never belonged to them, but to the machines they served...."
"I don't know about the buzzards," murmured Ladna dubiously.
Relez disregarded that. "What we need now is helpers. The anti-ionization field is the catalyst of peace, but if it is to work quickly, the confused peoples must have guidance.
"We've done a little advance missionary work among the more civilized and approachable tribes, both in the flesh, and by teleprojection, as Dunu appeared to you in the wilderness. The televiewer, incidentally, is another of our new developments; the old machines of that type used both a transmitter and receiver, but this one works on the principle you can see once in a while in nature, when atmospheric refraction is just right to reassemble the light from a distant object and project its picture in the air. Only very recently we perfected the reverse application of the effect, so that under good conditions we can project a three-dimensional image—mirage—over large distances.
"But those methods are inadequate for working directly on the minds of the peoples. Few as we are, we can't appear openly as authors of the change; for the time being, let them think it a natural phenomenon. However," his eyes met Torcred's and held them in a challenging gaze, "very much could be done to smooth a people's way toward civilization by an agent who belongs by birth to it...."
"I was a terrapin once," said Torcred steadily. "Now I am a man of the race of man. And in the eyes of the terrapins I am an outcast, accursed."
"I know. But your very return, when they think you dead, may help the break-down of the old habits and customs.... I don't say it will be easy. But I believe the desert has sharpened your wits."
Torcred considered. The mark on his forehead burned, but he remembered how there had been compassion in Vazcled's face even as he wielded the knife, and that his worst enemy was discreditably dead in the desert. "Perhaps," he muttered.
"If you go back," said Ladna quietly, "I go too."