"Do you know his name?"
"I couldn't see his face very well."
"What did he tell you?"
There was a long silence. Then Alan, his face contorted, said, "He didn't tell me anything. He only put on the lights. They were vivid as sin. Then there was a voice."
"What did the voice say? You can tell Brave, son. Good old Brave. You trust Brave."
He thought. "I can't tell you," he said. "Not even you. It was a voice. It was the voice. My voice. I love it."
"Isn't there anything you can repeat?"
"Yes. It said I had to forget the superman theory. It explained the accidents; and the disks. It's all natural. It isn't mutants."
Brave started to sweat. He pried at Alan's mind, learning almost everything about the night before. But he did not find out that Alan had first heard the voice at the telecast, nor did he learn that the voice and Alan were one, master and slave, but one. The earlier hypnosis had been too clever. It had struck at the roots of Alan's soul, becoming religion and truth to him, and he would not deny it or betray it.
At last realizing that he had heard all he was going to hear, the Indian gave Alan certain counter-commands. He repeated them until Alan squirmed and whimpered under the repetition. Finally Brave was satisfied. By using the powerful mechanical-visual stimuli, it was usually easy enough to plant ideas in a subject, and only infinitely stronger agents could destroy such ideas. Brave hoped that the enemy did not have stronger agents; but he knew that in the last analysis it was a timid and unsure hope indeed.