detector
set, and six hand weapons. Makes quite an equipment list."

"Any tools or maintenance equipment?"

Meinora shook his head. "Just operator manuals. And those will have
deteriorated long ago. An inspection team was supposed to visit once a
cycle for about fifty cycles, then once each five cycles after that.
They would have taken care of maintenance. This operation was set up
quite a while ago, you know. Operatives get a lot more training now--and
we don't use so many of them."

"So, something went wrong." Konar looked at the equipment on the bench.
"How?" he asked. "How could it have happened?"

"Oh, we've got the sequence of events pretty well figured out by now."
Meinora got to his feet. "Of course, it's a virtually impossible
situation--something no one would believe could happen. But it did." He
looked thoughtfully at the ruined communicator.

"You know the history of the original operation on this planet?"

"Yes, sir. I looked it over. Planet was checked out by Exploration. They
found a couple of civilizations in stasis and another that was about to
go that way. Left alone, the natives'd have reverted to a primitive
hunter stage--if they didn't go clear back to the caves. And when they
did come up again, they'd have been savage terrors."

"Right. So a corps of native operatives was set up by Philosophical, to
upset the stasis and hold a core of knowledge till the barbaric period
following the collapse of one of the old empires was over. One
civilization on one continent was chosen, because it was felt that its
impact on the rest of the planet would be adequate to insure progress,
and that any more extensive operation would tend to mold the planetary
culture."

Konar nodded. "The old, standard procedure. It usually worked better
than this, though. What happened this time?"

"The Merokian Confederation happened."

"But their penetration was nowhere near here."

"No, it wasn't. But they did attack Sector Nine. And they did destroy
the headquarters. You remember that?"

"Yes, sir. I read about it in school. We lost a lot of people on that
one." Konar frowned. "Long before my time in the Corps, of course, but I
studied up on it. They used some sort of screen that scrambled the
detectors, didn't they?"

"Something like that. Might have been coupled with someone's
inattention, too. But that's unimportant now. The important thing is
that the sector records were destroyed during the attack."

"Sure