We will meet and mass at this outer limit, fifteen to twenty of us, and by sheer force of numbers, will overtake the defenders. First, using our persuasive powers and all that we have learned about the aliens’ psychology we will attempt to woo them with sympathy for our position; will advise them of our torment, our pain, our need to escape or die. We will tell them tales of our home planet (all invented, of course, since we still will not have our memories) in order to cause them to feel pity and at last overwhelm them through sheer sentiment. If this does not work and even if it does, we will overpower the guards and, using their armaments, make our way out of the enclosure. From there we will be able to locate our ship by sight since, even at a distance of many miles, its size will surely be visible against the sky.
Using the armaments to protect ourselves and our position, we will make our way to the ship. Once aboard, all entrances will be sealed and we will then be able to leave without fear.
It is a simple plan, simple and bare in its outlines, but bound to work in terms of everything we have learned about the way in which the aliens think. Surely, despite the inspection tours, their surveillance must be weak after two years and four months. We have never before made a serious attempt to escape. The brutality and intimidation of the inspection tours indicate that they hold us in contempt and do not take the possibility of an escape seriously. Therefore they can so cheaply scatter threats.
The plan will work. It came to me in the aftermath of a dream and I know that it cannot fail. Past hypnotherapy, past all the blocks which have been implanted, the undiscovered part of me remains, pure and functioning; and it is upon that part that I rely. Before shiptime I must have been a leader; an important personality in whatever scheme I occupied. Now, even though my memory has been taken from me by my own people and I have been entrapped by ship and by aliens for almost three years, I remain what I was and in that simple reliance have found a strength that I did not know before existed.
We will overpower the guards and we will be free. Nala has nothing to do with the invention of the plan although I admit that she has touched me in ways that I had not known existed in the enclosure, and for her, as much as for Plotar’s memory, I want the plan to succeed. I want to be beside her when we return and our memories are replaced. I want to see what she looks like then. That should be worth all the risks taken, to touch her in the act of memory retrieval and to feel the snakes of recollection moving underneath her flesh.