Darrig and Cercy walked silently back to the control room. Neither had really expected that the Ambassador would be killed so easily, but it had still been a shock when the slugs had failed. "I suppose you saw it all, Malley?" Cercy asked, when he reached the control room. The thin, balding psychiatrist nodded sadly. "Got it on film, too." "I wonder what his philosophy is," Darrig mused, half to himself. "It was illogical to expect it would work. No race would send an ambassador with a message like that and expect him to live through it. Unless--" "Unless what?" "Unless he had a pretty effective defense," the psychiatrist finished unhappily. Cercy walked across the room and looked at the video panel. The Ambassador's suite was very special. It had been hurriedly constructed two days after he had landed and delivered his message. The suite was steel and lead lined, filled with video and movie cameras, recorders, and a variety of other things. It was the last word in elaborate death cells. In the screen, Cercy could see the Ambassador sitting at a table. He was typing on a little portable the Government had given him. "Hey, Harrison!" Cercy called. "Might as well go ahead with Plan Two." Harrison came out of a side room where he had been examining the circuits leading to the Ambassador's suite. Methodically he checked his pressure gauges, set the controls and looked at Cercy. "Now?" he asked. "Now." Cercy watched the screen. The Ambassador was still typing. Suddenly, as Harrison sent home the switch, the room was engulfed in flames. Fire blasted out of concealed holes in the walls, poured from the ceiling and floor. In a moment, the room was like the inside of a blast furnace. Cercy let it burn for two minutes, then motioned Harrison to cut the switch. They stared at the roasted room. They were looking, hopefully, for a charred corpse. But the Ambassador reappeared beside his desk, looking ruefully at the charred typewriter. He was completely unsinged. "Could you get me another typewriter?" he asked, looking directly at one of the hidden projectors. "I'm setting down a philosophy for you ungrateful wretches." He seated himself in the wreckage of an armchair. In a moment, he was apparently asleep. * * * * * "All right, everyone grab a seat," Cercy said. "Time for a council of war." Malley straddled a chair backward. Harrison lighted a pipe as he sat down, slowly puffing it into life. "Now, then," Cercy said. "The Government has dropped this squarely in our laps. We have to kill the Ambassador--obviously. I've been put in charge." Cercy grinned with regret. "Probably because no one higher up wants the responsibility of failure. And I've selected you three as my staff. We can have anything we want, any assistance or advice we need. All right. Any ideas?" "How about Plan Three?" Harrison asked. "We'll get to that," Cercy said. "But I don't believe it's going to work."