The executive staff of Special Weapons assembled in Roysland Dwyn's study via solidiphone at 2900 that evening. There were five of them at the table. Kiffer, Mardis, Taddibol, and Vanisson were actually thousands of parsecs away, on four widely scattered bases of the fleet. Roysland Dwyn, himself, was the fifth man. "I'm going to make this short and sweet," Roysland said. "I don't want much discussion until you've all had a chance to mull over the data in your minds for a while." He spent fifteen minutes telling them what he'd picked up so far. When he was finished, Vanisson asked: "Have you tried running this through a computer?" Roysland shook his head. "It can't be done. We don't have enough symbolizable data. Only the human mind can take incomplete data and come up with the right answer; we're going to have to do this ourselves. We'll have to probe into what we have and see if we come up with anything." "I've got a question," Mardis said. "Why does the enemy only pick on _aJ_ ships?" Roysland nodded. "And why do they invariably fire _immediately_ after the _aJ_ projectors fire?" Kiffer said: "Could it be some kind of subetheric vibration that does the trick?" "You're the subelectronics man," Roysland said. "What do you think?" Kiffer shrugged. "Subetherics are dangerous; near a projector, they can foul up electrical currents, provided the currents aren't too strong. They can knock a man out, or even kill him; but I never heard of any effect like this." "What would it take to get an effect like this?" Roysland asked. "Figure it from that angle." Taddibol looked excited. "Could it be that the enemy doesn't even have such a weapon?" They all looked at him. Roysland was grinning. "Maybe you've got the same hunch I have," Roysland said. "Let's hear it." "We know: one, it only happens on _aJ_ ships; two, it happens at the instant of firing. Could it be some sort of backlash from the projectors that's doing it?" Roysland, still grinning, looked at the subelectronics man. "How about it, Kiffer?" Kiffer shook his head. "I doubt it. There's a backwash, of course, as there is to any kind of no-space generator. But it's almost indetectable, even with subelectronic instruments. There's certainly not enough to hurt anyone. Besides, the emission would be from the exciter in the gun, and it would hit the men in one direction; that might slow their neural currents up a little for a fraction of a second, but it wouldn't do anything like what we have here, even if it were strong enough." All the time he had been talking, Mardis had been nodding his head in agreement. When Kiffer finished, Mardis said: "And besides that, we've tested the things, remember? We fired those projectors under every condition we could think of, and we didn't get any feedback lobotomies." Taddibol nodded. "That's right. We mounted four projectors on the X-69, and melted asteroids for six months before we released the weapon to the fleet."