"No. Your presence did not break the Inhibitor." He shook his head emphatically. "The Inhibitor won't hold me. I was ... what they call a natural TN-1. It didn't take me years to learn the techniques. I have," he smiled ruefully, "talent for it. The Inhibitor practically never works for naturals. It is surprising it lasted this long."

Klairon watched him narrowly. He wasn't so sure that his presence hadn't been a factor. With a natural, the Inhibitor was always precarious at the very best.

Talbert frowned, creasing his smooth skin into unaccustomed wrinkles. "But worse than my personal failure is the effect I am having on you. The tragedy I am feeling is doubled and redoubled by the knowledge of what I am doing to you.

"As you passed me a little while ago, I noticed how you're responding to me far too strongly, and I sensed that you're controlling it with one of the damper drugs, a particularly detestable form of suicide."

Klairon blinked in surprise. It would take an extraordinary sensitivity for a Gen to glean that much information just in passing. The Captain might have told him about the Adinamine, but there would be no point for Lowell to claim a sensitivity he didn't have. Impatiently, Klairon cut off that line of thought. He must not allow himself to be influenced by personal desires. Thanks to the drug, it wasn't difficult.

Talbert continued, "As for my discomfort ... I'm already well above my normal maximum potential. I could hold out for another few days, perhaps, for still there is some Inhibitor effect, but in the end I would come begging to you." He said it evenly, calmly; an impersonal statement of fact. But everybody watching him noted the hard tension in his body lines, like a balloon about to burst from internal pressure.

"I know that is the way it would end, for already have I encountered the strength of the Principles," then his eyes closed for a moment as if to cover a pain too sharp to bear. "Under other circumstances, I might make a fight of it. I could try to force you to come to me. But that is my vindictive pride speaking, for victory would be a sour defeat.

"I would have hurt you, shaken the very foundations of your life, but not even touched the Principles I have come to hate." He looked up at Klairon's image and then at the others with him, his jawline hard and sharp, challenging. "Yes, I said hate. Apparently, a human Dyei'n can know hate.

"But the only lasting monument to my hate would be a dead planet; not a scratch on the system that killed my wife and my first child, not a life ennobled, but rather the devastation of a planet of people who knew nothing of the forces acting on their lives.

"And how many young loves, such as my own, would I have destroyed? One? Ten? A thousand? For what?

"I am a TN-1. I am filled with hate. But I am also a Dyei'n." His eyes sparked with the pride of his people who had taken the non-human Dyei'n language and philosophy as their own. "My hate is narrowed, directed and intensified against the Sime Principles of Action, not against innocent people, not against myself and certainly not against you.

"Therefore, in all humility, in the greatest possible ...purely personal ... sincerity," he looked into Klairon's eyes for the first time with a long, steady gaze, "I declare myself forin."

Klairon was convinced as he never thought he could be that this was Talbert's own decision. Talbert's inner conflict, if not resolved, was at least disengaged from the issues at hand.

By declaring himself forin, physically and emotionally ready to donate selyn, he was returning to his profession, if not willingly, at least with the strong philosophic resignation of his people, untainted by any of Welch's persuasion. Some of the arguments were similar to what the Captain would use, but the whole approach was from a different angle.

He leaned forward, filling Talbert's screen with a bigger than life image of his head, and breathed softly, "Sosu, lliraititsang."

It was the polite request, "TN-1, attend me, now." There were a hundred different ways he could have phrased it, but he made it his own personal request with no indication of the other's position, or of any urgency.

And with that decision, in spite of the drug heavy within him, Klairon felt his lateral tentacle sheaths fill with ronaplin, that special, most precious, moisture that would be instantly absorbed by the Gen's skin, opening pathways to the flow of selyn. He was eager, now, to be rid of the Adinamine and to be close to this extraordinary TN-1.

Swiftly, he cut the connection with a back-handed flick of a dorsal as he rose.

At that moment, there was a loud, rending crash, a short, but frightening wind as air pressure dropped. The deck lurched and vibrated with low register sound like a hung gong tapped lightly with a felt hammer.

Klairon was thrown against his desk trying to catch his balance by clutching at the inter-view console and the orgonics tubing that snaked from the back of the instrument to the wall and ultimately to the main selyn banks, but he was unable to stop himself and went thudding to the deck carrying the small console with him.

Through his grip on the orgonics tubing, he was linked to the main selyn banks. Suddenly, he found himself at a higher selyn potential than the ship's selyn-powered systems, higher than the entire selyn-storage capacity of the banks. Normally, the selyn systems operated at high potential and low current. Now, in one instant, it had changed to low potential and high current, and there was a forced drain from him into a vacuum that could only have been created by an impossibly tremendous leak in the ship's selyn systems.

Stunned, Klairon fought to override the Adinamine that was resisting the swift, massive flow as an electric resistor resists electric current even to its own destruction. He strove desperately to release the selyn stored in his body, but the drug also slowed his reaction time.

It seemed that selyn transfer events he normally dominated now happened faster than he could perceive them. He could not relax his barriers quickly enough to release selyn at the rate demanded by the potential difference. Frantic now, he switched his attention to the purely mechanical act of breaking his physical contact with the orgonics tubes.

He was like a man who's touched a high voltage wire while standing, barefoot, in mud. He couldn't let go. His body was rigid, paralyzed by the unnaturally immense current through his nerves.

Helpless, Klairon faced death as he had hundreds of times before. The Simes' most dreaded horror, death by attrition, death from lack of selyn, was no stranger to the channel. But it still took an uncommon courage to face it with cool resignation.

Until, finally, it was over. He could move. He broke contact that had held him and lay gasping, numb and dazed. He was almost depleted; at the same near zero potential as the banks. They could suck no more from him. And he was badly burned. But he was still alive... for a few more minutes, anyway ... Klairon's will to live took over again.

He looked at his arms. The potential difference had been so great that selyn was drawn through the slight insulation of his lateral sheaths and the excellent insulation of the orgonics tubing. But it left no visible mark.

He was aware that he survived mainly because the ronaplin sensitized condition of his laterals kept the nerve damage to a minimum, that if he'd applied that inhibiting cream or if he'd not been so strongly stimulated by Lowell that ronaplin was produced in spite of the drug, he would now be dead.

He staggered to his feet, reeling dizzily, and launched himself toward the door. All the ship's systems sighed, wheezed and rumbled to silence, darkness. The ship was dead.

Klairon got the door open and clung to it fighting desperately for equilibrium. The silence was appalling, but he could hear boots on the stairs, lightly now in the rapidly fading gravity.