Roysland shook his head. "You misunderstand me. I most certainly did intend to get animal specimens. I figured the answer was involved with the aliens themselves, but I didn't know what the gimmick was.
"Now I know that it was the interaction of the aJ's backwash and the enemy's beam that caused the mindjammer effect. The enemy's weapon was intended as a death ray, but for some reason, it doesn't work on humans."
"That's right," said Taddibol. "The enemy projector was designed to disintegrate the molecule of a particular enzyme that is necessary to Enlissa life. It does the job beautifully, too. When the beam hits an Enlissa, the enzyme disintegrates, oxidation can no longer take place in the tissues, and presto! the Enlissa dies. But our own system is so different that the beam doesn't even effect us."
"The answer's been right in front of our eyes for a long time," Kiffer said. "The backwash from the aJ's has too long a wave length to be effective, and the Enlissa's death ray is too short. But the complex harmonic of the two is just right. It creates a momentary field that causes the loop-feedback to start in the prefrontal lobes. From what we can gather, the effect is one of intense, overpowering curiosity—inwardly directed."
"Statistically," Allerdyce cut in, "it accounts for the peculiar behavior of the enemy ships, too. If we assume that a little over twenty-five per cent of their ships are equipped with what they think is a death ray, you'll get the right figures. About the same number of our ships are equipped with aJ projectors.
"When a death-ray ship comes in on an aJ ship, the aJ guns cut it down and the crew is mindjammed. But if a death-ray ship comes in on one of our conventionally armed ships, they're blasted out of the sky because they figure that everyone aboard the ship is dead and they don't bother to fire any torpedoes. Our own torpedoes come as a pretty rude surprise. So the enemy has lost one hundred per cent of their death-ray equipped vessels in every engagement!"
Roysland nodded. "We couldn't see it because we weren't looking for it. I suspected at first that it had something to do with the aJ's; the statistics suggested that. But when every test showed that it couldn't possibly be our own projectors, and when this Enlissa projector came along, I made the mistake of dropping the previous line of approach. Keep that in mind, boys; you can forget old theories, but you can't forget old data.
"By the way, commander, did you figure out how we happened to get the Enlissa ship?"
"Sure," said Allerdyce. "When they came in so close, they were caught by the field that was generated. The thing has an effective englobement volume with a radius of about six hundred miles. We don't know what the effect is near the outside, of course, but we're working on it."