"Told you!"
"Put us back!"
It was an entirely unpremeditated, unconscious duet. The two old officers were completely dumfounded. Arisians never had come out of their shells, they never would. Infinitely less disturbing would have been the authentic tidings that a brick house had fallen upstairs. They had nursed this romance along so carefully, had timed it so exactly, and now it had gone p-f-f-f-t—it had been taken out of their hands entirely. That thought flashed through their minds first. Then, as catastrophe follows lightning's flash, the real knowledge exploded within their consciousnesses that, in some unguessable fashion or other, the whole Boskonian campaign had gone p-f-f-f-t, too.
Port Admiral Hayes, master tactician, reviewed in his keen strategist's mind every phase of the recent struggle, without being able to find a flaw in it.
"There wasn't a loophole anywhere," he said aloud. "Where did they figure we slipped up?"
"We didn't slip—I slipped," Kinnison stated, flatly. "When we took Bominger—the fat Chief Zwilnik of Radelix, you know—I took a bop on the head to learn that Boskone had more than one string per bow. Observers, independent, for every station at all important. I learned that fact thoroughly then, I thought. At least, we figured on Boskone's having lines of communication past, not through, his Regional Directors, such as Prellin of Bronseca. Since I changed my line of attack at that point, I did not need to consider whether or not Crowninshield of Tressilia III was by-passed in the same way; and when I had worked my way up through Jalte in his star cluster to Boskone itself, on Jarnevon, I had forgotten the concept completely. Its possibility did not even occur to me. That is where I fell down."
"I still don't see it!" Haynes protested. "Boskone was the top!"
"Yeah?" Kinnison asked, pointedly. "That's what I thought—but prove it."
"Oh." The Port Admiral hesitated. "We had no reason to think otherwise—looked at it in that light, this intervention would seem to be conclusive—but before that there were no—"
"There were so," Kinnison contradicted, "but I didn't see them then. That's where my brain went sour; I should have seen them. Little things, mostly, but significant. Not so much positive as negative indices. Above all, there was nothing whatever to indicate that Boskone actually was the top. That idea was the product of my own wishful and very low-grade thinking, with no basis or foundation in fact or in theory. And now," he concluded bitterly, "because my skull is so thick that it takes an idea a hundred years to filter through it—because a sheer, bare fact has to be driven into my brain with a Valerian maul before I can grasp it—we're sunk without a trace."