There were three men in the Secretary of State's private office. Ghopal Singh, the Secretary, dark-faced, gray-haired, slender and elegant, meeting me halfway to his desk. Another slender man, in black, with a silver-threaded, black neck-scarf: Rudolf Klueng, the Secretary of the Department of Aggression. And a huge, gross-bodied man with a fat baby-face and opaque black eyes. When I saw him, I really began to get frightened. The fat man was Natalenko, the Security Cooerdinator. "Good morning, Mister Silk," Secretary Ghopal greeted me, his hand extended. "Gentlemen, Mr. Stephen Silk, about whom we were speaking. This way, Mr. Silk, if you please." There was a low coffee-table at the rear of the office, and four easy chairs around it. On the round brass table-top were cups and saucers, a coffee urn, cigarettes--and a copy of the current issue of the _Galactic Statesmen's Journal_, open at an article entitled _Probable Future Courses of Solar League Diplomacy_, by somebody who had signed himself Machiavelli, Jr. I was beginning to wish that the pseudonymous Machiavelli, Jr. had never been born, or, at least, had stayed on Theta Virgo IV and been a wineberry planter as his father had wanted him to be. As I sat down and accepted a cup of coffee, I avoided looking at the periodical. They were probably going to hang it around my neck before they shoved me out of the airlock. "Mr. Silk is, as you know, in our Consular Service," Ghopal was saying to the others. "Back on Luna on rotation, doing something in Mr. Halvord's section. He is the gentleman who did such a splendid job for us on Assha--Gamma Norma III. "And, as he has just demonstrated," he added, gesturing toward the _Statesman's Journal_ on the Benares-work table, "he is a student both of the diplomacy of the past and the implications of our present policies." "A bit frank," Klueng commented dubiously. "But judicious," Natalenko squeaked, in the high eunuchoid voice that came so incongruously from his bulk. "He aired his singularly accurate predictions in a periodical that doesn't have a circulation of more than a thousand copies outside his own department. And I don't think the public's semantic reactions to the terminology of imperialism is as bad as you imagine. They seem quite satisfied, now, with the change in the title of your department, from Defense to Aggression." "Well, we've gone into that, gentlemen," Ghopal said. "If the article really makes trouble for us, we can always disavow it. There's no censorship of the _Journal_. And Mr. Silk won't be around to draw fire on us." _Here it comes_, I thought. "That sounds pretty ominous, doesn't it, Mr. Silk?" Natalenko tittered happily, like a ten-year-old who has just found a new beetle to pull the legs out of.