rnon's left said, leaning
forward. "Father has meant to take this step for a long time. He was
waiting until after the election, and then he decided to do it now, to
give you an opportunity to make experimental use of it."

The man on Dallona's right added his voice. Like the others at the
table, he was of medium stature, brown-skinned and dark-eyed, with a
wide mouth, prominent cheekbones and a short, square jaw. Unlike the
others, he was armed, with a knife and pistol on his belt, and on the
breast of his black tunic he wore a scarlet oval patch on which a pair
of black wings, with a tapering silver object between them had been
superimposed.

"Yes, Lady Dallona; the Lord Garnon and I discussed this, oh, two
years ago at the least. Really, I'm surprised that you seem to shrink
from it, now. Of course, you're Venus-born, and customs there may be
different, but with your scientific knowledge--"

"That may be the trouble, Dirzed," Dallona told him. "A scientist gets
in the way of doubting, and one doubts one's own theories most of
all."

"That's the scientific attitude, I'm told," Dirzed replied, smiling.
"But somehow, I cannot think of you as a scientist." His eyes traveled
over her in a way that would have made most women, scientists or
otherwise, blush. It gave Dallona of Hadron a feeling of pleasure. Men
often looked at her that way, especially here at Darsh. Novelty had
something to do with it--her skin was considerably lighter than usual,
and there was a pleasing oddness about the structure of her face. Her
alleged Venusian origin was probably accepted as the explanation of
that, as of so many other things.

As she was about to reply, a man in dark gray, one of the
upper-servants who were accepted as social equals by the Akor-Neb
nobles, approached the table. He nodded respectfully to Garnon of
Roxor.

"I hate to seem to hurry things, sir, but the boy's ready. He's in a
trance-state now," he reported, pointing to the pair of visiplates at
the end of the room.

Both of the ten-foot-square plates were activated. One was a solid
luminous white; on the other was the image of a boy of twelve or
fourteen, seated at a big writing machine. Even allowing for the fact
that the boy was in a hypnotic trance, there was an expression of
idiocy on his loose-lipped, slack-jawed face, a pervading dullness.

"One of our best sensitives," a man with a beard, several places down
the table on Dallona's right, said. "You remem