With complete disregard interplanetary order they harassed and attacked peaceful shipping and inoffensive cultures throughout a wide territory. For years the Council debated and threatened -- but nothing was ever done. Then, so gradually it was hardly noticed, the harassments began to die down. The warlike posturing was abandoned by the Markovians. Within a period of about seventy or eighty years there was a complete about-face.What had happened? Cameron and his new wife Joyce are going into unfriendly regions to find out, in this classic adventure from one of the early novelists of science fiction, Raymond F. Jones.