Mark shook his head. "Don't underrate Dar Vaajo! He's an old man now, but cunning. An opportunist. He's never forgotten how Princess Aladdian of Venus, through her treaty with Earth, put an end to his dreams of conquest."[2] [Footnote 2: _Alcatraz of the Starways_, Planet Stories, May, 1943.] "Yes, I remember it well." Ketrik was thoughtful. "But how could Dar Vaajo make a play now against the power of Earth, or for that matter Perlac?" Mark permitted himself a smile. He didn't miss the implication that Perlac, too, was fast becoming a power to be reckoned with. "I'll give you the facts," he said quietly, "and you can judge. About two years ago, Dar Vaajo stopped all Uranium shipments from Mars. That in itself is comparatively unimportant. What is important, is the Earth Council. Now consider, Ketrik--I've been close to these men for four years. Very often it has seemed to me that where rudimentary logic should dictate a course of action, they incomprehensibly choose to follow another. So it was with this Uranium embargo. They might easily have forced a showdown, but instead, they seemed satisfied with Dar Vaajo's peculiar evasions. "Of course, about this time Earth's quarrel with Perlac was reaching a crisis. But even there, I noticed definite trends of irrational thinking on the part of the Members. At our frequent sessions to discuss the Perlac question, they seemed to appreciate all the factors involved--even that we were fast losing our best scientific talent to Perlac. Yet their damned egotisms crept through, dictating to their reason. Ketrik, I swear to you that when they voted sending a fleet of Patrollers out to Jupiter to prevent your men from landing there, I did everything in my power to prevent it. But again my voice was one against eleven. And believe me, the majority vote of Council is final--irrevocable." "I have reason to know that," Ketrik said. "But, Mark, I still fail to see this danger you spoke of." "I'm getting to it. And this is the part that's frightening. About a month ago, in my own home, I set up a secret Cerebro-Scanner. Know what that is?" "Never heard of it." "It's new, and plenty dangerous in the wrong hands. Works on a ray principle. Produces elaborate graphs of an individual's mental and emotional co-ordinates. Well, on a secret wave-length I probed the minds of my fellow Council Members!" Mark smiled. "Yes, I'd probably receive sentence of death if they knew, but the end justified the means. Ketrik, the resulting graphs reveal that the cerebro-thalamic co-ordinates of the Council Members do not vary in the slightest! They are the same down to ten decimal points!" Ketrik gestured helplessly. "Is this important?"