dreamed up again, because the principle of a
workable star-drive has never been formulated before. And it still isn't
finished. It can't be finished, unless--"

He stopped, and both men turned their attention to the outside.

"Bellaver's looking at his chrono," said Hyrst. "Go ahead, we've got a
minute."

Shearing continued, "unless we can get hold of enough Titanite to build
the hyper-shift relays. Nothing else has a fast enough reaction time,
and the necessary load-capacity. We must have burned out a thousand
different test-boards, trying."

"Can't you buy it?" asked Hyrst. The question sounded reasonable, but he
knew as he said it that it was a foolish one. "I mean, I know the stuff
is scarcer than virtue and worth astronomical sums--that's what
MacDonald was so happy about--but--"

"The Bellaver Corporation had a corner on the stuff before our ship was
even thought of. That's what brought this whole damned mess about. Some
of our people--not saying why they wanted it, of course--tried to buy
some from Bellaver in the usual way, and one of them must have been
incautious about his shield. Because a Lazarite working for Bellaver
caught a mental hint of the starship, and the reason for the Titanite,
and that was it. Three generations of Bellavers have been after us for
the star-drive, and it's developed into a secret war as bitter as any
ever fought on the battlefield. They hold all the Titanite, we hold the
ship, and perhaps now you're beginning to see why MacDonald was killed,
and why you're so important to both sides."

"Beginning to," said Hyrst. "But only beginning."

"MacDonald found a Titanite pocket. And as you know, a Titanite pocket
isn't very big. One man can break the crude stuff, fill a sack with it,
and tote it on his own back if he doesn't have a power-sled."

"MacDonald had a sled."

"And he used it. He cleaned out his pocket, afraid somebody else would
track him to it, and he hid the wretched ore somewhere. Then he began to
dicker. He approached the Bellaver Corporation, and we heard of it and
approached _him_. He tried playing us off against Bellaver to boost the
price, and suddenly he was dead and you were accused of his murder. We
thought you really had done it, because no Titanite turned up, and we
knew Bellaver hadn't gotten it from him. We'd watched too closely. It
wasn't until some years later that one of our people learned that
MacDonald had threatened a little too loudly to sell to us