ay keeps surprisingly quiet but it is as well that the rest of the
party start to trickle in about twenty minutes later the first
arrivals remarking Oh _that's_ where you've got to!

Presently we are all congregated at one end of the table as before,
except that Mr. Yardo is now sitting between B and me; when M'Clare
and the colonel come in he firmly stays where he is evidently
considering himself One of Us now.

"The proposition," says M'Clare, "is that we intend to take
_Gilgamesh_ to Incognita and land her there in such a way as to
suggest that she crashed. In the absence of evidence to the contrary
the Incognitans are bound to assume that that was her intended
destination, and the presence of weapons, even disarmed, will suggest
that her mission was aggressive. Firstly, can anyone suggest a better
course of action? or does anyone object to this one?"

We all look at Lennie who sticks his hands in his pockets and mutters
"No."

Kirsty gives her little cough and says there is a point which has not
been mentioned.

If a heavily-armed ship crashes on Incognita, will not the government
of the hemisphere in which it crashes be presented with new ideas for
offensive weapons? And won't this make it _more_ likely that they will
start aggression? And won't the fear of this make the other hemisphere
even more likely to try and get in first before the new weapons are
complete?

Hell, I ought to have thought of that.

From the glance of unwilling respect which the colonel bestows on
M'Clare it is plain these points have been dealt with.

"The weapons on Gilgamesh were disarmed when she was rediscovered," he
says. "Essential sections were removed. The Incognitans won't be able
to reconstruct how they worked."

_Another_ fact for which we shall have to provide an explanation. Well
how about this: The early explorers sent out by these people--the
people in Gilgamesh ... oh, use Cray's word and call them Lost
Kafoozalum anyway their ships were armed, but they never found any
enemies and the Idealists of B's story refused even to carry arms any
more.

(Which is just about what happened when the Terries set out to
rediscover the colonies, after all.)

So the Lost Kafoozalum could not get rid of their weapons completely
because it would have meant rebuilding the ship; so they just
partially dismantled them.

Mr. Yardo suddenly chips in, "About that other point, girlie, surely
there must be some neutral ground left on a