"We didn't agree to it then," Kay cut in, stormily, "and I for one am not going to agree to it now. You don't have to do it today. In fact, later on would be better. Anyway, Kit, I'm telling you right now that if you go in, we all go, as individuals if not as the Unit." "Act your age, Kay," he advised. "Get conscious. This is one of the two places in the Universe that can't be worked from a distance, and by the time you could get here I'll have the job done. So what difference does it make whether you agree or not? I'm going in now and I'm going in alone. Pick _that_ one out of your pearly teeth!" That stopped Karen, cold--they all knew that even she would not endanger the enterprise by staging a useless demonstration against Eddore's defensive screens--but there were other arguments. Later, he was to come to see that his sisters had some right upon their side, but he could not see it then. None of their ideas would hold air, he declared, and his temper wore thinner and thinner. "No, Cam--NO! You know as well as I do that we can't all be spared at once, either now or at any time in the near-enough future. Kay's full of pickles, and you all know it. Right now is the best time I'll ever have. "Seal it, Kat--you _can't_ be that dumb! Taking the Unit in would blow things wide open. There isn't a chance that I can get in, even alone, without touching _something_ off. I, alone, won't be giving too much away, but the Unit would be a flare-lit tip-off and all hell would be out for noon. Or are you actually nitwitted enough to think that, all Arisia to the contrary, we are ready for the grand showdown? "Hold it, all of you! Pipe down!" he snorted, finally. "Have I got to bash in your skulls to make you understand that I can't co-ordinate an attack against something without even the foggiest idea of what its actual physical setup is? Use your brains, kids--_please_ use your brains!" He finally won them over, even Karen; and while his speedster covered the last leg of the flight he completed his analysis. He had all the information he could get--in fact, all that was available--and it was pitifully meager and confusingly contradictory in detail. He knew the Arisians, each of them, personally; and had studied, jointly and severally, the Arisian visualizations of the ultimate foe. He knew the Lyranian impression of the Plooran version of the story of Eddore. Ploor! Merely a name. A symbol which Mentor had always kept rigorously apart from any Boskonian actuality. Ploor _must_ be the missing link between Kalonia and Eddore. And he knew practically everything about it except the two really important facts--whether or not it really was that link, and where, within eleven thousand million parsecs, it was in space!