time," Kiffer said. "The backwash from the aJ's has too long a wave length to be effective, and the Enlissa's death ray is too short. But the complex harmonic of the two is just right. It creates a momentary field that causes the loop-feedback to start in the prefrontal lobes. From what we can gather, the effect is one of intense, overpowering curiosity—inwardly directed."

"Statistically," Allerdyce cut in, "it accounts for the peculiar behavior of the enemy ships, too. If we assume that a little over twenty-five per cent of their ships are equipped with what they think is a death ray, you'll get the right figures. About the same number of our ships are equipped with aJ projectors.

"When a death-ray ship comes in on an aJ ship, the aJ guns cut it down and the crew is mindjammed. But if a death-ray ship comes in on one of our conventionally armed ships, they're blasted out of the sky because they figure that everyone aboard the ship is dead and they don't bother to fire any torpedoes. Our own torpedoes come as a pretty rude surprise. So the enemy has lost one hundred per cent of their death-ray equipped vessels in every engagement!"

Roysland nodded. "We couldn't see it because we weren't looking for it. I suspected at first that it had something to do with the aJ's; the statistics suggested that. But when every test showed that it couldn't possibly be our own projectors, and when this Enlissa projector came along, I made the mistake of dropping the previous line of approach. Keep that in mind, boys; you can forget old theories, but you can't forget old data.

"By the way, commander, did you figure out how we happened to get the Enlissa ship?"

"Sure," said Allerdyce. "When they came in so close, they were caught by the field that was generated. The thing has an effective englobement volume with a radius of about six hundred miles. We don't know what the effect is near the outside, of course, but we're working on it."

"You know," Roysland said, "mankind has known for centuries the old dictum that 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,' but we sometimes forget how it works in practice. We still tend to look from cause to effect and from effect to cause.

"But in this case, there were two 'causes' of the mindjammer field, and three 'effects' from the two 'causes.' And that's simplifying a great deal. We still haven't dug into what else we can get from subetheric harmonics phenomena."

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