 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. Number two suffered from some sort of emotional block that left him continually on the horns of one dilemma or another. No two men were alike, and yet there sometimes seemed to be an eternal sameness about all men. 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. To have shown himself to one of them would have meant instant loss of prestige. 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. "Armistice," he said in a low whisper. The Karna, slowly being beaten back on every front, were suing for peace. Earth was willing. 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. The trouble was that the Karna had a reputation for losing wars and winning at the peace table. 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. But if the armistice went to their own advantage ... Already, they had taken the offensive in the matter of the peace talks. 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.
 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.