"No need to. I've figured out that one, too. When I first figured out just what parabolite was, I compared it to a rubber ball on an elastic cord. Trying to destroy it by force was impossible. It just bounced and swung into the cushion of its fourth dimension. But, sticking with the analogue, what happens if the rubber ball is attacked from all sides simultaneously? It has nowhere to go, then. And, I asked myself, what could attack parabolite from even its extra dimension? What, except another piece of parabolite? Oh, not in the frictive way, like diamond cutting diamond. You still controlled only three of the dimensions using that method. And it had been tried already by scientists and found useless. So you had to attack it on the no-dimensional level. Since the three forms of matter--solid, liquid and gas--all must exist with height, breadth and depth, you had to use the only thing in our universe that we have besides matter: energy. Fire? No, heat had been tried already. Atomic dissolution? A bit better, perhaps; a battery of collapsers, working on the subatomic level, had managed to destroy a fraction of a gram of the stuff, simply from the laws of _chance_ encounters with parabolite molecules in the fourth dimension. A ray as powerful as the collapser-ray undoubtedly accidentally gets generated in an extra dimension, but only in the most minor way, not nearly enough for your purpose." "And what," Baxter asked between tautened lips, "is my purpose?" "Since your rule-the-worlds dream necessitates the ability to teleport your agents wherever you please, you must have parabolite wherever you please. This in turn necessitates pulverizing the mineral down to its very molecules, and sowing it into the atmosphere of the three planets. Then you will be free to take complete command. The hitch, of course, is that the pulverization of parabolite would engender, as the Ancient put it, a jolt. A jolt which would unlatch Location from our dimension, sending the Ancients off forever. They didn't like the idea, and so they set out to destroy you." Baxter's jaw, during the last part of my narrative, had gone slack, and he stared at me idiotically. I had to grin. "Yes, I know what suffering you're going through at this moment, Baxter old boy. 'All for nothing,' you're telling yourself. If you had only known, huh?" "You--you mean," he licked his dry lips and stared at me, horribly upset, "that all I had to do to be rid of the Ancients was to go ahead with my scheme? Simply pulverizing a hunk of that stuff would have sent them off?" I nodded, ironically. "Yes. No need to rig a bomb, to send me seeking them, to try and set this bomb off in their midst. You could have set it off right back on Earth, and been just as rid of them." "No need," he repeated dully. Then, suddenly alert; "Set it off? How did you know?"