to the psychological effects."

Kiffer Samm looked up at the great frame of his superior, and grinned sardonically. "O.K. Now we've got the effect and the weapon that causes it. Can we correlate the two?"

Roysland shrugged his broad shoulders. "Sure we can. But how long will it take us?"

The laws of the universe may not differ from place to place, but the methods of using them do; and the particular laws that may be discovered in one place aren't necessarily the same ones that are discovered in another. No two human beings think alike; two different evolutionary branches of intelligence, stemming from totally different beginnings, certainly can't be expected to reason similarly. The amazing thing about the Enlissa was not the ways in which they differed from humanity, but the ways in which they were similar.

So it wasn't to be wondered at that the Special Weapons technicians couldn't figure out for the life of them what the projectors from the Enlissa ship did, or why they worked. If they had been the type of men to be stymied by seemingly-unbreakable barriers, they would have gone off their collective rockers in the first three weeks.

One by one, Roysland Dwyn called in the best analysts from every sector of the human-controlled galaxy. And slowly the information began to build up.

The first firing test of the enemy weapon was conducted on Syndor, the outermost and smaller of the two satellites of Kandoris VI. Roysland had the thing taken to the subnucleonics lab there because he felt that there was no need to subject the population of Kandoris to any danger from the backwash—if any. And only God knew how much territory the effective field might cover.

The Special Weapons group had dismantled one of the projectors from the ship and loaded it carefully on the X-69, along with the Enlissa-built generator that powered it.

On Syndor, Roysland watched the unloading. He stood on the broad, airless stretch of the landing field and watched the grapples lower the big, tubular weapon to the deck of the field. The blue-white glare of the distant sun splashed off the metallic sides of the ship, forcing Roysland to narrow his eyes, in spite of the heavy polarized filter in the helmet of his spacesuit.

The thing floated down under the control of the grapple beams until it was only a few feet from the surface.

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