To a people who had been pressed starving into the snowy mountains for centuries, it must look like quite a tragedy. “Feed the children,” said Jonnie.

“Oh, we have, we have,” said the chief. “Even the dogs. But we've still got lots too much food. I tell you what we'll do. There's an empty apartment and we'll set it up for a dining room and we will feed you a beautiful dinner.”

"I’ve got something to do,” said Jonnie.

“Oh, no problem, no problem. It is very stylish to eat late. The cook will be so pleased. Here,” and he made a dash outside to the hall and brought back a tray with some soup and small patties of dough and meat. “These are...no Psychlo word...between-meal-bites. Help us out!”

Jonnie laughed. If that was all the problems they had, life would be a basking in the sun!

He sat down in a chair and began to eat the snack. Tsung, after setting up a small table, was back to bobbing again.

“What's he bowing about?” said Jonnie.

The chief waved his hand and Jonnie saw that a fourth viewscreen had been installed, making two for the conference room. “He's been in here all the time you were on that platform, working a Coordinator half to death translating. They've got discs of everything that went on. The second screen was so they could see both you and the emissaries. I looked in here a time or two-'

Mr. Tsung was volubly interrupting him. The chief translated, “He wants you to know that you are the fastest pupil he has ever seen. He says if you had been an imperial Prince of China and his family had still been chamberlains and not exiled, China would still be there.”

Jonnie laughed and would have acknowledged with a return compliment but Mr. Tsung was talking very fast and drawing something from his sleeve. “He wants something,” said the chief. “He wants you to put your 'chop' on this paper. That is, your signature.” He was unfolding it. It was a considerable expanse of Chinese characters.

The chief raised his eyebrows and translated the sense of it for Jonnie. “This says that you approve the cancellation of exile of his family from the Imperial Court and that you recommend its reinstatement as chamberlains to the principal government of this planet and yourself.

"I’m not a member of the government,” said Jonnie.

“He knows all that, but he wants your chop on it. I warn you that he has two brothers and several relatives. They're all educated in diplomacy and such. Oh, he tells me there's a second paper here. Yes. This one restores their rank as Mandarins of the Blue Button– lets them wear a round cap with a blue button on top– noblemen, actually. It 's valid. They are noblemen.”

“But I’m not-' began Jonnie.

Mr. Tsung sang off into half-a-dozen trills of protest.

“He says you don't know what you are. Put your chop on these and he'll

do the rest.”

Jonnie said, “But I have no authority. The war isn't over yet. Not by a long ways! I-'

“He says wars are wars and diplomats are diplomats and there is no point in the game when it ends. I’d sign them, if I were you, Lord Jonnie. They're all studying Psychlo and English. It 's his chance to attain an eleven-hundred-year-old goal. I’ll read these word for word for you.”

Well, Jonnie felt they might not have made it without Mr. Tsung, so he was given a brush and he signed them and Chief Chong-won witnessed them.

Mr. Tsung reverently folded the pieces of paper into a cover of gold brocade and laid them away like they were crown jewels.

“Oh, yes,” said Jonnie as he left. “One more thing. Tell him how much I enjoyed that tale about the dragon who ate the moon.”

Part XXVIII

Chapter 1

Psychlo!

The home planet of two hundred thousand worlds.

The center of an empire that had ruled and ruined sixteen universes over a period of three hundred and two thousand years.

Psychlo. That had been the cause of man's destruction.

What had happened to its empire, if anything?

What had happened to Psychlo? And if it still existed, what did it plan?

Was it a danger or not?

For a grueling and turbulent year they had wondered. It lay like a nagging barb under their thoughts.

Now they were going to find out.

Pale light lit the bowl. The metal of the platform shone dully. Not a motor to be heard in the sky. The stars were bright above.

Angus and Jonnie looked at each other. Now they would know.

“First,” said Jonnie, “we will inspect minesites and see what transshipment rigs are active. Perhaps there is some indicator somewhere that would alert them to this. We will be cautious, not get too close to anything.”

The coordinate book told them of a transshipment rig at Loozite, a Psychlo mining world without population other than Psychlo miners. It was a large planet but distant from Psychlo.

They put the new gyrocage down, put a picto-recorder in the armored case, calculated the coordinates for a point forty miles from the Loozite transshipment site, punched the console buttons, and fired.

The wires hummed. The cage came back. There was a slight recoil.

Jonnie put the disc in the atmosphere projector that still stood there.

He pressed the button.

For a moment both he and Angus thought they must have miscalculated and shot a mine instead. Forty miles was a long way off for detail and Jonnie adjusted and recentered the scene before them.

It was a hole!

But not a mine. There stood a transshipment pole at a drunken angle.

But it was otherwise just a hole in the planet surface. No trace even of compound domes.

Jonnie wondered whether they had different compound layouts on different planets. Perhaps that Loozite platform had been miles from anything else. Still, the Psychlos were demons for standard layouts. Usually the whole central administration of the planet was at the transshipment rig. For there was where the ore came from all over the planet. There was where the books were kept, where the main shops existed, where the top executives were.

Just that hole. It was pretty big, but a hole is a hole.

They chose another firing site: Mercogran in the fifth universe. It was shown as a planet five times the size of Earth but of less density.

They fired and recalled the gyrocage.

When Jonnie turned the projector on, they saw at once they had something different. They had to widen the view on the projector to see better.

Mercogran had been close to a mountain range and avalanches had apparently come down. They would have covered much of the space of any compound.

Jonnie brought the view in closer. There! At the lower right! The inverted bowl of a compound dome. It was lying like a broken soup plate. There was a transshipment pole and attached charred wires sitting in the middle of it. But nothing else.

So far no tight conclusion could be reached beyond the fact that those central compounds and transshipment rigs were certainly no longer working.

At random they took another planet: Brelloton. It was an inhabited planet, another reference told them, with a population of its own, governed by a Psychlo “regency,” enduring such rule for sixty thousand years.

They calculated the coordinates for a spot forty miles from the transshipment rig and fired the gyrocage.

They were not prepared for what they got. The atmosphere image showed a city. The transshipment rig there had apparently been on a raised plateau in the center of town.

Buildings that once must have been massive were blown to bits. They made a spreading pattern that radiated out from the plateau. Buildings that must have been two thousand feet high in a city that must have held a million beings or more had fallen outward like dominos.