 Why does Malloy send James Nordon to the peace talks?
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. Number two suffered from some sort of emotional block that left him continually on the horns of one dilemma or another. 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. 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 came in through the door, a rather handsome woman in her middle thirties, clutching a sheaf of papers in her right hand as though someone might at any instant snatch it from her before she could turn it over to Malloy. Interstellar war is too costly to allow it to continue any longer than necessary, and this one had been going on for more than thirteen years now. If they won the armistice, they'd be able to retrench and rearm, and the war would break out again within a few years. They could be forced to allow supervision of the production potential, forced to disarm, rendered impotent. They had sent a full delegation to Saarkkad V, the next planet out from the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited only by low-intelligence animals. The Karna considered this to be fully neutral territory, and Earth couldn't argue the point very well. In addition, they demanded that the conference begin in three days, Terrestrial time. It would take more than a week for the Earth government to get a vessel to Saarkkad V. Earth had been caught unprepared for an armistice.
 Nordon has trouble making decisions but will commit once the Karna present him with a choice that is not rigged in the Karna's favor.
 Nordon has trouble making decisions but will commit once the Karna present him with a choice that is not rigged in the Karna's favor.  Nordon is going to the peace talks to assist Braynek in case of a trap.  Nordon is the best negotiator Earth has to offer.  Nordon is a trained assassin. He will be ready to take out the ambassador from Karn if there is any funny business.