enemy. I was better dead to you than alive.'
The boy listened.
'Stupid. And a traitor to your own race.'
'The war is over,' Leo said. 'You won.'
Hulann hunched as if bending over a pain in his stomachs. 'No! No, the war is not over-until one or the other race is extinct. There is no quarter in this battle.'
'You can't believe that.'
Hulann did not speak. He did not, of course, believe it — just as the boy had said. Perhaps he had never believed it. Now, he realized the war was somewhat of a mistake. Man and naoli had never been able to co-exist even in a cold war sort of situation. They were too alien to meet on any common ground. Yet this child was reachable. They were communicating. Which meant there had been a flaw in their reasoning-which meant the war could have been avoided.
'Well,' Hulann said, 'I have no choice. I must open these cellars to the researchers on my team. I cannot hide their existence. I'll string the lights. If you are not gone when I call them in, it is your problem. It is no longer mine.'
He got up and began his work for the day. Two hours before he was due to go to the traumatist, he had strung lights through most of the cellars. He came back and looked at the boy. 'The next cellar is the last. I've finished.'
Leo said nothing.
'You should be going.'
Again: 'There is nowhere for me to go.'
Hulann stood, watching the child for a long while. At last, he turned and unstrung the glow bulbs, pulled up the poles he had planted, rewound the wire and took everything into the outer cellar. He came back and put his handlamp with the boy.
'It will give you light tonight.'
'Thank you,' Leo said.
'I have undone my work.'
Leo nodded.
'Perhaps, tomorrow, I can fill up the crevice in the wall of ruins, seal this at the last cellar and try to keep the continuation from being discovered. Then, you would not be bothered.' 'I'll help you,' Leo said.
'You know,' Hulann said, his heavy face strained so even the boy could see the anguish in the alien features, 'you are? you are? crucifying me?'
And he went away. Leaving the boy with light.
'Come in, Hulann,' the traumatist Banalog said, smiling and friendly as all traumatists are with their patients. He exuded a fatherliness, an exaggerated sense of well-being that could not help but infect his charges.
Hulann took the seat to the right of Banalog's desk while the older naoli went behind and sat down in his customary chair, leaned back and feigned relaxation.
'I am sorry I forgot to arrange an appointment yesterday,' Hulann said.
'Nothing damaged,' Banalog assured him gently, quietly. 'Just shows that this guilt is not so bad as the Phasersystem computer thinks. Otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to continue working as you did.' Banalog wondered if his lie was transparent. Hulann seemed to perk up, and he thought that he had told it with conviction. But now he was certain that the archaeologist was consciously aware of his guilt and trying to hide it.'
'I didn't know I had a guilt complex until the Phasersystem told me about it.'
Banalog waved his hands to indicate the unimportance of the situation Hulann now found himself in. The point was to, a little at least, put the patient at ease. He pulled his chair in closer to the desk, rested his arms on the top and began to punch a series of buttons on his multicolored control console.
There was a stirring above Hulann's head. As he looked up to see the cause of the noise and movement, the hood of the monitoring robot, gray and dully burnished, descended like a landing shuttlecraft. It stopped two feet above where he sat, the four-foot diameter of the hood radiating, to all sides of him.
Banalog worked other controls, calling forth a post which consisted of lenses and sensors of various types, all of high receptivity. It rose from the floor, half a dozen feet before Hulann, stopped when it was at his eye level.
'I thought this equipment was for severe cases,' he said to Banalog, losing the sense of ease he had entered this room with, a hard edge of terror in his voice.
'Misconception,' Banalog said as if he were quite bored, really, with this whole affair. 'We have much more sophisticated equipment for a severe case.'
'But are you afraid that I would lie to you?'
'No, no. I do not insult you, Hulann. Such a thing is opposite of my purpose. But remember that the mind is strange. Your overmind may lie to you. You would sit there telling me what you thought was the truth about your guilt complex-but it would still be festering inside you. We are all creatures strange to our own selves.'
The machines vibrated slightly as they came to life out of oiled slumber. Some of the sensors glowed green, like a naoli's eyes. Others were yellow and purple. Hulann's skin crawled as the probing waves penetrated him without sensation and began collecting data for the traumatist.
'Then it is necessary?' he asked.
'Not necessary, Hulann. That makes it sound as if you are in a bad way. You do not feel ill, do you? I should hope not. Believe me, I think your problem is a minor one. Not necessary, just standard procedure in such a case.'
Hulann nodded, resigned to it. He would have to be extremely cautious and hedge his answers, try to be as honest as possible-but also try to phrase his responses so that they were literally true while not giving away the exact situation.
The questioning began gently.
'You like your work, Hulann?'
'Very much.'
'How many years have you been an archaeologist?'
'Seventy-three.'
'Before that?'
'A writer.'
'How interesting!'
'Yes.'
'A writer of what?'
'History. Creative history.'
'Archaeology, then, was a natural follow-up.'
'I suppose so.'
'Why do you like archaeology, Hulann? Wait. Why do you like this archaeological job in particular?'
'The excitement of resurrecting the past, of finding things unexpectedly, of learning.'
Banalog checked the readout monitors on his desk and tried to keep from frowning. He looked up at Hulann and, with an effort, smiled. 'Does your work here on this planet assauge your guilt any?'
'I don't understand.'
'Well, do you feel as if you are working out a penance, so to speak, in re-constructing the daily life of mankind?'
And so the questions went. Probing? prodding? It soon began to be clear to Hulann that Banalog was learning more than he had intended to let him discover. He tried to answer as well as he could, but there was no way to hide from the probing traumatist and the clever machines.
Then the trouble came.
Banalog leaned forward, conspiratorially, and said, 'Of course, Hulann, you are as aware as I am that your subconscious guilt is now a conscious one.'
'I-'
Banalog frowned and waved him to silence before he could offer denial. 'It is. I can see that, Hulann. But there is something else you are hiding from me.'
