away, on four widely scattered bases of the fleet.

Roysland Dwyn, himself, was the fifth man.

"I'm going to make this short and sweet," Roysland said. "I don't want much discussion until you've all had a chance to mull over the data in your minds for a while."

He spent fifteen minutes telling them what he'd picked up so far. When he was finished, Vanisson asked: "Have you tried running this through a computer?"

Roysland shook his head. "It can't be done. We don't have enough symbolizable data. Only the human mind can take incomplete data and come up with the right answer; we're going to have to do this ourselves. We'll have to probe into what we have and see if we come up with anything."

"I've got a question," Mardis said. "Why does the enemy only pick on aJ ships?"

Roysland nodded. "And why do they invariably fire immediately after the aJ projectors fire?"

Kiffer said: "Could it be some kind of subetheric vibration that does the trick?"

"You're the subelectronics man," Roysland said. "What do you think?"

Kiffer shrugged. "Subetherics are dangerous; near a projector, they can foul up electrical currents, provided the currents aren't too strong. They can knock a man out, or even kill him; but I never heard of any effect like this."

"What would it take to get an effect like this?" Roysland asked. "Figure it from that angle."

Taddibol looked excited. "Could it be that the enemy doesn't even have such a weapon?"

They all looked at him. Roysland was grinning. "Maybe you've got the same hunch I have," Roysland said. "Let's hear it."

"We know: one, it only happens on aJ ships; two, it happens at the instant of firing. Could it be some sort of backlash from the projectors that's doing it?"

Roysland, still grinning, looked at the subelectronics man. "How about it, Kiffer?"

Kiffer shook his head. "I doubt it. There's a backwash, of course, as there is to any kind of no-space generator. But it's almost indetectable, even with subelectronic instruments. There's certainly not enough to hurt anyone. Besides, the emission would be from the exciter in the 

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