"Sit down, Major," Berin was saying. "Commander Edder told me you'd be around, but he only hinted at the trouble." "Is this room sealed, Mr. Klythe?" the major asked calmly. Klythe reached across his desk and touched a panel. "It is now." The major nodded. "We don't want any of this to leak out; it might cause panic." He paused for a moment. "You're a Sirian by birth, aren't you, Mr. Klythe?" Klythe nodded. "My grandparents were among the first colonists on New Brooklyn." "Then you probably know first hand how tough it is to tame an extra-solar planet, no matter how closely it approaches Earth-type." Klythe nodded, narrowing his eyes. "So when a colony disappears, we don't think anything of it--" Stratford stopped, frowning. "No, I don't mean that. What I mean is, we usually attribute it to another loss in our fight against the natural forces of the planet. The colony's gone; you blame disease, the flora, the fauna, the storms, everything else. Then you try to re-establish the colony. "But lately things have been happening in a certain sector. I'm not at liberty to say where, nor what happened. Whole colonies were gone when the five-year check came. The pattern was only in one area, but we're pretty sure of what's happening. Something out there, something intelligent in its own way, is erasing those colonies. Our analysts suspect that whoever or whatever is doing it doesn't know we're intelligent. What it boils down to is this: we have an interstellar war on our hands." Klythe nodded slowly after a moment. "I get it. That's why you asked for this funny modification of the drive generator--the new J-233. It isn't supposed to be a drive generator at all." "That's right," said Major Stratford, "it's a weapon." "Why tell us now?" Crayley asked softly. "I mean, you've ordered the thing; we've practically got it ready. Why not leave us in the dark?" "We don't want you to build it now. We've got a better one--much better. But it calls for a gadget that you'd immediately know was not a driver. We decided to tell you rather than have you asking embarrassing questions. "And we have neither the facilities nor the capacity to build it ourselves." Crayley said slowly, "You mean the J-233 is obsolete? We scrap it without ever putting it in production?" "That's right," said the major. He grinned. "You were just telling me how adaptable your production machinery is to--ah--re-tooling, I think you called it. I was glad to hear it." _Damn!_ Crayley thought. _Damdamdamdamdamn!_ His mind whirled for a moment, hopping frantically from one point to another. Then he forced it to be calm. Everything wasn't lost--just delayed. "--in the strictest confidence," the major was saying. "Nothing must leak out. We don't want to throw a scare into the world population just now." Klythe looked as though he had a good case of goosebumps himself. Crayley felt nothing. He said, "How soon can you get the original down here?"