After fifty years of near-lightspeed travel, the ship entered the sun's gravitomagnetic field, which electron-triggered the machinery. The wave-charts, not as yet deteriorated by the rather short trip, fed into the converter. The coded pulses were then metamorphosed again into matter: spaceships and crews.

It was during the mid-1940's, that Terrans themselves succeeded in their first experiments with energy-into-matter conversion. They didn't know, as they celebrated feeble success in creating several atoms from energy and adding them to some carbon molecules, that the Priami not only anticipated them by quite a few hundred years but used the classic development to survive as a race.

The newcomers, noting the large population, industries, and quarrelsomeness of the Terrans, ignored Earth and burrowed into arid Mars. They freed oxygen from the rusty rocks and contented themselves with sending occasional space ships to report on their neighbors' progress.

By the time man's rockets reached Mars, the Priami were beginning to build on the surface, whose sterile soil was being converted to fertility. In several more centuries they would make of the red globe a smaller, but green Earth.

Only one thing could destroy them-man. Strangely, the Martians didn't fear man's bombs or diseases or rapacity. They dreaded a factor which man himself would never have considered a weapon. Man was a liar!

The Priami could not lie, or rather, if they did, it was by a super-effort of will. But then they went into psychosomatic decline and death, often suicide. Prolonged and intimate contact with man would lead to race extinction.

Nonlying was a culturally-conditioned characteristic. Many Priami, realizing they would inevitably have to face man in numbers, tried to change their culture. They were determined to teach themselves to lie and to listen to lies. However, the flexibles met opposition. The change was delayed so bitterly that it would be centuries before Mars as a whole would be a planet of prevaricators. Meanwhile, the Priami issued ultimatums to keep off Terrans. When man, unable to take their life-and-death problem seriously, persisted, the Priami attacked Earthmen in self-defense. The first interplanetary war had begun.

Independently, Terra evolved its energy-matter converters and transmitters. During the mid-twentieth century scientists photographed individual atoms with electron microscopes. Out of these were born electronic scanners that could "blueprint" the most complicated matter. Combining these with the converters, the scientists could disintegrate a rocketship, atom by atom, and beam them in pulses, to be reassembled at a distance.

By Yewliss' time, they proved that electrons consisted of points of convergence in lines of force or energy waves. They formed positive and negative convergence points from energy to build atoms, and so on up the scale of size to complete man.

Humankind was justly proud of this achievement, but soon found that the EPB-converters could only be set up on Earth, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter's moons and some of the asteroids. The Priami had stations and colonies on every other body worth occupying. They warned that if man transgressed, a converter ship would drop close to Earth and would materialize a whole fleet of war-vessels.

Earth could do the same to Mars, but retribution would follow.

There was a stalemate. Yet, a move could be made, and Terra could make it. She knew of a new weapon that could nullify enemy Energy-Pulse-Blueprint Realizers, while her own dropped unmarked upon Mars. It was called the Belos, the Greek word for weapon. The principle of the Belos was known quite well. The application was not.

According to theory, a series of tremendous generators from North Magnetic Pole to South Magnetic Pole, geared thus to the Earth's electro-magnetic field, would produce a shell of energy around the globe. This shell corresponds, for various scientific reasons, with the ionosphere, and would work on a principle first deduced in the 1940's by two British astronomers. This was the idea that the universe was expanding and being kept from entropy because hydrogen atoms were continuously forming in space. Later, scientists found that it was, instead, electrons that formed de nova. These, along with some short-lived subatomic particles came into being when gravitomagnetic lines of force converged.

Founded on this discovery, the Belos shell consisted of shifting electro-magnetic stresses, statically bound to cross enough energy waves so particles would be "created". Thus, if a Priami materializer-rocket penetrated the Earth's atmosphere with the intention of converting a huge fleet in the air, before the Terrans could do anything about it, the attack would be thwarted. The Belos would generate "endostatic", mixing the matter with foreign particles, then adding or subtracting electrons from the new configurations, making accurate materialization impossible. If the converter-ship stayed far out of the Belos, it might as well not leave its home port, for Earth radar would pick up the distant Martians, and send interceptors. To be effective, the invaders should come into being at close range, but as long as the third planet had the Belos, they could do it. Only one man knew how to put the Belos into operation. He would not tell. His name was Bill Ogtate.

Bill Ogtate was sitting at a little table, contemplating a queen, when he heard a copter cutting the air outside. "You'd better take off," he said to Smith, his opponent.

Smith withdrew a three-fingered hand from a king. "Take off? That means fly? Remove? Unveil? Imitate?"

"Fly. Flee. Run. Dismiss yourself."

"Dismiss Smith? Ah, go away! But who would visit you?"

"Well, you have," said Ogtate. He smacked his lips as if his mouth tasted bitter.

Smith stood up. There was a strong light behind him. The pulsing of his green-blue bloodstreams and the slow squeezing of his intestines showed dimly, as in a fog. You could never accuse Smith of being thick-skinned.

Smith talked from behind a two-foot-long, elephantine trunk and a fleshy, walrus mustache. From time to time little spearheaded teeth showed in his mouth. There were two rows that moved sidewise in opposite directions. Here was the original living meatgrinder. "Do you have any cigarettes on you?" he asked, his voice amplified by the large throat-sac hanging from his neck. "If your visitor is female, I may be in the ship for quite a while. I haven't any smokes down there."

"I'm sorry I taught you to enjoy tobacco," said Ogtate as he tossed a package.

The Martian caught it in his trunk and walked to the corner. There he lifted the rug, opened a trap-door, and climbed through it. Ogtate replaced the rug and walked to the front of the house.

When he saw the woman, he clung to the sides of the door. "Lord," he said, "I thought at first you were Barbara."

"I am Barbara," she answered. She had a beautiful smile. "I'm Major Barbara Killison. I'm a doctor. I understand you're sick."

"So that's the way the wind blows, is it?" he snarled. "How dumb do they think I am? Sure, I was sick and will be again. But I'm not so far out of my head that I don't know when I'm being played for a fall guy."

"May I come in?" she asked coolly. She marched straight at him. He had to let her in or else block her body. At the last moment, he stepped aside and watched her put her bag on a table, open it and take out a stethoscope. "Would you mind unbuttoning sour shirt?"

"That, too? Sure, I'll take off everything. That's what they put you up to, isn't it?"

"I may have to give you a complete examination." He laughed loudly. "Come on, Killison. Let's not be coy. I know that Old Fox Yewliss is bent on forcing the Belos from me. I know how his mind works. He submits a list of facts, or supposed facts, about my life to the Comprob. `What says the Coruprob?' he asks. And it answers that if he wants the secret, send some one who can seduce it front me. A Delilah to clip the long-haired Samson. Get a girl who looks like his wife. He'll like that; he's very much in love with her. Have her be a doctor. If all else fails, she can bat her lashes over her big blue eyes and say shell make the sacrifice. She'll allow herself to be aspated and share his lonely life. Together, two against the world, they'll walk hand in hand into the setting sun and make beautiful music together. There's only one catch in the whole plan. I won't follow it."