"No, I'm afraid we've just run up against another blind alley." Kiffer shook his head slowly. "I don't believe it," he said. "The Enlissa didn't have their ship armed with this thing for nothing. We must have connected it up wrong, somehow." "Maybe," Roysland said. "But it doesn't work as is. Let's get these records into the jeep; I want to see what we're getting here, anyway." They took the recordings out of the instruments and dropped them to the three men who were waiting by the jeeps parked underneath the tower. A few minutes later, they were heading back toward the dome. * * * * * Four days later, Roysland was back on Kandoris VI, ensconced firmly in his office. Kiffer Samm stayed on Syndor, still working on the Enlissa projector. The first thing Roysland did was to call another staff meeting. He also included Bilford and Commander Allerdyce. He outlined briefly the data they had so far on the Enlissa mindjammer, then asked for comments. Bilford grabbed the floor first. "I did the correlation you wanted, and I came up with some answers, but they're not the right ones as far as I can tell. "As far as the backwash on the _aJ_ gun is concerned, I think you can rule that out. After converting to electromagnetic equivalents, I find that the frequency of the backwash is much too low to have any effect on the brain. That is, assuming that subetherics have any effect on the mind at all--and, of course, assuming that there is any analogy at all between the function of subetheric vibrations and electromagnetic vibrations. After all, analogue reasoning has its limitations, too, just as logical reasoning does. "The captured Enlissa projector is another problem. Unlike the _aJ_'s backwash, it isn't a noise; it's a definite, although complex, tone. I say complex because--and again my reasoning is analogical--because the frequency is not a pure sine wave, but a combination. It's analogous to the difference between the vibration of a tuning fork sounding middle C and, say, a violin sounding the same note. "Even so, I think we can say that the captured projector is _not_ the mindjammer; the frequency is much too high. It's on the order of hard X-rays. If the analogy holds, the subetheric beam should be capable of disrupting certain molecules, but it most certainly couldn't have the mindjamming effect on the human brain." He sat down and rubbed his hands together nervously. Commander Allerdyce stood up. Normally, the fleet commander did not kowtow to anyone, but his automatic respect for the big man in the chair at the head of the table came to the fore. As a matter of fact, the commander didn't think of it as kowtowing; he merely acknowledged the superior abilities of the man he was facing.