pologized.

"Oh, that's all right. I wouldn't go into all that, though. We don't
want to overload them."

She asked permission, a little later, to explain why the triangle tip
of the arctic continent, which had begun to edge into sight on the
screen globe, couldn't be seen from the ship. When he told her to go
ahead, she got a platinum half-sol piece from her purse, held it on the
globe from the classroom and explained about the curvature and told them
they could see nothing farther away than the circle the coin covered. It
was beginning to look as though the psychological-warfare experiment
might show another, unexpected, success.

[Illustration]

There was nothing, after the islands passed, but a lot of empty water.
The shoonoon were getting hungry, but they refused to go below to eat.
They were afraid they might miss something. So their dinner was brought
up on deck for them. Miles and Travis and Edith went to the officers'
dining room back of the bridge. Edith, by now, was even more excited
than the shoonoon.

"They're so anxious to learn!" She was having trouble adjusting to that;
that was dead against EETA doctrine. "But why wouldn't they listen to
the teachers we sent to the villages?"

"You heard old Shatresh--the fellow with the pornographic sculpture and
the yellow robe. These young twerps act like fools, and sensible people
don't pay any attention to fools. What's more, they've been sent out
indoctrinated with the idea that shoonoon are a lot of lying old fakes,
and the shoonoon resent that. You know, they're not lying old fakes.
Within their limitations, they are honest and ethical professional
people."

"Oh, come, now! I know, I think they're sort of wonderful, but let's
don't give them too much credit."

"I'm not. You're doing that."

"_Huh?_" She looked at him in amazement. "Me?"

"Yes, you. You know better than to believe in magic, so you expect them
to know better, too. Well, they don't. You know that under the
macroscopic world-of-the senses there exists a complex of biological,
chemical and physical phenomena down to the subnucleonic level. They
realize that there must be something beyond what they can see and
handle, but they think it's magic. Well, as a race, so did we until only
a few centuries pre-atomic. These people are still lower Neolithic, a
hunting people who have just learned agriculture. Where we were twenty
thousand years ago.

"You think any glib-talking Kwann can hang a