ts, and the people of Nansal believed them dead. Nansal was at
peace.

But the Satorians managed to live on the alien world, and they built a
civilization there, a civilization based on an entirely different
system. It was a system of cunning. To them, cunning was right. The man
who could plot most cunningly, gain his ends by deceiving his friends
best, was the man who most deserved to live. There were a few
restrictions; they had loyalty, for one thing--loyalty to their country
and their world.

In time, the Satorians rediscovered the space drive, but by this time,
living on the new planet had changed them physically. They were somewhat
smaller than the Nansalians, and lighter in color, for their world was
always sunless. The warm rays of the sun had tanned the skins of the
Nansalians to a darker color.

When the Satorians first came to Nansal, it was presumably in peace.
After so many hundreds of years without war, the Nansalians accepted
them, and trade treaties were signed. For years, the Satorians traded
peacefully.

In the meantime, Satorian spies were working to find the strengths and
weaknesses of Nansal, searching to discover their secret weapons and
processes, if any. And they rigorously guarded their own secrets. They
refused to disclose the secrets of the magnetic beam and the magnetic
space drive.

Finally, there were a few of the more suspicious Nansalians who realized
the danger in such a situation. There were three men, students in one of
the great scientific schools of Nansal, who realized that the situation
should be studied. There was no law prohibiting the men of Nansal from
going to Sator, but it seemed that Nature had raised a more impenetrable
barrier.

All Nansalians who went to Sator died of a mysterious disease. A method
was found whereby a man's body could be sterilized, bacteriologically
speaking, so he could not spread the disease, and this was used on all
Satorians entering Nansal. But you can't sterilize a whole planet.
Nansalians could not go to Sator.

But these three men had a different idea. They carefully studied the
speech and the mannerisms and customs of the Satorians. They learned to
imitate the slang and idioms. They went even further; they picked three
Satorian spaceship navigators and studied them minutely every time they
got a chance, in order to learn their habits and their speech patterns.
The three Satorians were exceptionally large men, almost perfect doubles
of