"Statistically," Allerdyce cut in, "it accounts for the peculiar behavior of the enemy ships, too. If we assume that a little over twenty-five per cent of their ships are equipped with what they think is a death ray, you'll get the right figures. About the same number of our ships are equipped with _aJ_ projectors. "When a death-ray ship comes in on an _aJ_ ship, the _aJ_ guns cut it down and the crew is mindjammed. But if a death-ray ship comes in on one of our conventionally armed ships, they're blasted out of the sky because they figure that everyone aboard the ship is dead and they don't bother to fire any torpedoes. Our own torpedoes come as a pretty rude surprise. So the enemy has lost one hundred per cent of their death-ray equipped vessels in every engagement!" Roysland nodded. "We couldn't see it because we weren't looking for it. I suspected at first that it had something to do with the _aJ_'s; the statistics suggested that. But when every test showed that it couldn't possibly be our own projectors, and when this Enlissa projector came along, I made the mistake of dropping the previous line of approach. Keep that in mind, boys; you can forget old _theories_, but you can't forget old _data_. "By the way, commander, did you figure out how we happened to get the Enlissa ship?" "Sure," said Allerdyce. "When they came in so close, they were caught by the field that was generated. The thing has an effective englobement volume with a radius of about six hundred miles. We don't know what the effect is near the outside, of course, but we're working on it." * * * * * "You know," Roysland said, "mankind has known for centuries the old dictum that 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,' but we sometimes forget how it works in practice. We still tend to look from cause to effect and from effect to cause. "But in this case, there were two 'causes' of the mindjammer field, and three 'effects' from the two 'causes.' And that's simplifying a great deal. We still haven't dug into what else we can get from subetheric harmonics phenomena." Roysland looked at Bilford. "How did you do this quick-cure stunt?" Bilford shrugged. "Simple. I fiddled around until I got a subetheric harmonic that corresponded to the frequencies of the microwaves I was using. Works fine." Kiffer chimed in again with: "With the stuff we got from your instruments on the X-69 I think we can build the weapon we've been so afraid of." "Won't the Enlissa be able to analyze it?" Bilford asked, interestedly. "After all, _we_ figured it out." "Not the same thing," said Kiffer. "They don't have _aJ_ projectors yet. They can't accidentally generate the field." "Besides," Commander Allerdyce said grimly, "we won't leave them any evidence. If the weapon works, we'll beam 'em down, board 'em, and end up with prisoners and a perfectly good ship. The Enlissa will never know what happened to them."