Still in his suit of armor but minus the helmet, Stewart sat trancelike near the cave entrance. He hadn't said a word in hours. Nor had he uttered half a dozen words since the attack. Beside him, Carol murmured, "It's going to be all right, Dave. Everything's going to be all right." She placed a hand on his forehead, then looked worriedly at the director. Stewart, however, wasn't even interested in the fact that she had misinterpreted his numb silence. For the thousandth time he searched his mind for all its hidden knowledge on the alien space ship, on how he had gained that information, how he could have forgotten it. Carol tried to console him again, as though he were a child. "We'll get home all right. Then we'll get out of the Bureau. We'll go to Terra--you and I--and you'll see how happy we'll be." On any other occasion, those words would have sent him into handsprings. But now they just bounced off his traumatic shield. Then, suddenly, he had it. He _knew_ what had happened. He rose, fully in command of himself finally, and struggled out of the heavily-shielded space suit. Then he faced the others. "I've known all along," he said, "that we might be attacked out here by an alien ship." Carol gasped. McAllister lunged erect. Mortimer, puzzled, started forward. But Randall stopped him. "Wait," the director urged. "We may want to hear this." "I said," Stewart continued, "that I knew it all along. But I didn't _know_ I knew it." He looked away from their bewildered expressions. "Harlston and I made an advance exploration trip to the Hyades, all right. But we _didn't_ find seven--or was it eight?--Earth-type worlds. We didn't even drop back into the continuum. Because we found evidence of bustling subspace travel and communications that indicated a vigorous culture of star-traveling Hyadeans!" McAllister swore. Mortimer came forward, perplexed. "But--" Randall motioned for silence. "Let him finish." "We got the hell out of there," Stewart said, "without even having seen a Hyadean. We figured that if there was another intelligent race in this part of the galaxy, it might be a hostile one. And our worlds had to know about it. We couldn't chance being captured. "So we started making subspace leaps back home. One of those jumps ended here--where we had dropped off the telepuppet barge on our way out. At long range, we had a look at that team. And there was an alien ship down there--maybe the same one that attacked us this morning. It could only mean that the Hyadeans were expanding into our sector of the galaxy." Stewart paused and stared at the cave floor, still confused over what had made him forget all that. Then he went on, but only surmising the rest: