All memory of our star of origin was blocked from us as the last step before we embarked. Personal memories as well were eviscerated through the clever implementation of hypno-techniques which I do not understand. Although seemingly cruel—we were, after all, deprived of a past—this process was done in our interest so that we would not, willingly or unwillingly, divulge our point of origin to aliens who might be advanced enough to destroy us or brutal enough to commandeer a crew and return with explosives to our own base.

Also therapeutically blocked from our conscious and subconscious reflexes was any explanation of our mission—why we were to go to these aliens and reveal to them all our enormous technological capacities and secrets. Knowledge of the motives of our mission, we were told, might somehow block our performance.

We were promised, however, that upon the successful completion of the assignment we would have all memories returned in full and would find, one by one, that they were far more exquisite than anything which had happened to us during the mission.

There were rumors on the ship going toward that system that we might be a crew of felons whose crimes had been blocked from consciousness as part of remission, but that would not comply with the promised exquisiteness of our history.

“We will do what we have to do and are told to do and then we will return,” the first in the hierarchy, the leader of the mission (who said he knew as little about his history as any of us), told us at our initial meeting; and I have no reason, these many years later, to think that he wanted to be mysterious.

We have, of course, told them of the process which blocked our location, memory, and purpose and the aliens have, in their own way, tried to loosen the restraints. Nothing comes under ther­apy, however, but blankness. Before the time of the ship I recall nothing, other than that I lived simply and was not happy.