“It is good that you appreciate the superiority of our instruments,” Thagobar said grimly. “Now—your name.”
“Edwin Peter St. John Magruder.”
Psychologist Zandoplith watched the needle and nodded.
“Excellent,” said Thagobar. “Now, Edwin—”
“Ed is good enough,” said Magruder.
Thagobar blinked. “Good enough for what?”
“For calling me.”
Thagobar turned to the psychologist and mumbled something. Zandoplith mumbled back. Thagobar spoke to the specimen.
“Is your name Ed?”
“Strictly speaking, no,” said Magruder.
“Then why should I call you that?”
“Why not? Everyone else does,” Magruder informed him.
Thagobar consulted further with Zandoplith and finally said: “We will come back to that point later. Now… uh… Ed, what do you call your home planet?”
“Earth.”
“Good. And what does your race call itself?”
“Homo sapiens.”
“And the significance of that, if any?”
Magruder considered. “It’s just a name,” he said, after a moment.
The needle waggled.
“Another lie,” said Thagobar.
Magruder grinned. “Just testing. That really is a whizzer of a machine.”
Thagobar’s throat and face darkened a little as his copper-bearing blue blood surged to the surface in suppressed anger. “You said that once,” he reminded blackly.
“I know. Well, if you really want to know, Homo sapiens means ‘wise man.’ ”
Actually, he hadn’t said “wise man”; the language of the Dal didn’t quite have that exact concept, so Magruder had to do the best he could. Translated back into English, it would have come out something like “beings with vast powers of mind.”
When Thagobar heard this, his eyes opened a little wider, and he turned his head to look at Zandoplith. The psychologist spread his horny hands; the needle hadn’t moved.
“You seem to have high opinions of yourselves,” said Thagobar, looking back at Magruder.
“That’s possible,” agreed the Earthman.
Thagobar shrugged, looked back at his list, and the questioning went on. Some of the questions didn’t make too much sense to Magruder; others were obviously psychological testing.
But one thing was quite clear, the lie detector was indeed quite a whizzer. If Magruder told the exact truth, it didn’t indicate. But if he lied just the least tiny bit, the needle on the machine hit the ceiling—and, eventually, so did Thagobar.
Magruder had gotten away with his first few lies—they were unimportant, anyway—but finally, Thagobar said: “You have lied enough, Ed.”