 Does Earth want peace with Karn?
Every man in the Diplomatic Corps who developed a twitch or a quirk was shipped to Saarkkad IV to work under Bertrand Malloy, Permanent Terran Ambassador to His Utter Munificence, the Occeq of Saarkkad. He trusted no one, and was perpetually on his guard against imaginary plots and persecutions. Number two suffered from some sort of emotional block that left him continually on the horns of one dilemma or another. He was psychologically incapable of making a decision if he were faced with two or more possible alternatives of any major importance. No two men were alike, and yet there sometimes seemed to be an eternal sameness about all men. Out there was the terrible emptiness of interstellar space—a great, yawning, infinite chasm capable of swallowing men, ships, planets, suns, and whole galaxies without filling its insatiable void. Somewhere out there, the ships of Earth were ranged against the ships of the alien Karna in the most important war that Mankind had yet fought. He was not in the battle line, nor even in the major production line, but it was necessary to keep the drug supply lines flowing from Saarkkad, and that meant keeping on good terms with the Saarkkadic government. The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid in physical form—if one allowed the term to cover a wide range of differences—but their minds just didn't function along the same lines. For nine years, Bertrand Malloy had been Ambassador to Saarkkad, and for nine years, no Saarkkada had ever seen him. To have shown himself to one of them would have meant instant loss of prestige. The Occeq of Saarkkad himself was never seen except by a handful of picked nobles, who, themselves, were never seen except by their underlings. To violate the rigid social setup of Saarkkad would mean the instant closing off of the supply of biochemical products that the Saarkkadic laboratories produced from native plants and animals—products that were vitally necessary to Earth's war, and which could be duplicated nowhere else in the known universe. It was Bertrand Malloy's job to keep the production output high and to keep the materiel flowing towards Earth and her allies and outposts. Not the worst ones, of course; there were places in the galaxy that were less important than Saarkkad to the war effort. "A special communication for you has been teletyped in from Earth. She wanted to know what his reaction was going to be; it didn't matter because no one would ever find out from her what he had done unless she was ordered to tell someone. "Armistice," he said in a low whisper.
 The Earth is ready for peace, as interstellar war is costly.
 The Earth is ready for peace, as interstellar war is costly.  Earth needs to eliminate the Karna to protect the galaxy.  The Earth does not want peace with the planet Karn. The Karna are an evil race.  The Earth wants peace but doesn't trust the Karna to hold up their end of the bargain.