"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?"