 Why is the distorter drive so dangerous?
If they carried out the threats of their present attitude, Earth would have to send Marshall to replace him. A pair of guards, their purple hides smoothly polished and gleaming with oil, crossed their ceremonial pikes in front of him as he approached the entrance. "Just tell him that a man has arrived from Earth to talk to him. "But then I'm told you're an Earthling. "It was only decided yesterday, back on Earth, that I would be the one to make the trip here. What I meant was that I expected someone from Earth to break through our blockade and come here. Still, if you were on your home planet only yesterday, that's astonishing even to me. "If you wanted someone from Earth to come here to see you, why did you put the cordon around Earth? And why did you drop a planet-buster in the Pacific Ocean, and tell us that it was triggered to go off if we tried to use the distorter drive? Provinces consist, in general, of about a hundred Clusters apiece, and every Cluster has an average of a hundred inhabited solar systems. There are more inhabited planets in the Galaxy than there are people on your single world. "You upstart Earthlings are a strange and a frightening race," he said. When you showed up in the spaceways, it was decreed that you had to be stopped at once.
 The distorter drive has a seventy-three percent chance of destroying everything around it for thousands of miles.
 The distorter drive has a seventy-three percent chance of destroying everything around it for thousands of miles.  The distorter drive has not been thoroughly tested.  The distorter drive is powered by a nuclear reactor.  The distorter drive is radioactive.