Ivan Rutherford Y Barra, Permanent Secretary of the United Planets, watched the thin trail of fire in the star-sprinkled night sky and felt stirrings of familiar panic. Although he had greeted incoming representatives of the inner and outer planets some three hundred-odd times during his six-year tenure as Permanent Secretary—although the curved window through which he watched was a two-foot-thick panel of plexiquartz—although he knew the descending space-ship was chained to its landing beam mor