 Who are the kind of men who are sent to Sararkkad IV?
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. 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. 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. A staff of top-grade men could have handled them without half trying. Not the worst ones, of course; there were places in the galaxy that were less important than Saarkkad to the war effort. Miss Drayson stood there calmly, her face a mask; her emotions were a secret. 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.
 Men who have mental illnesses.
 Men who are hardened criminals.  Men who have mental illnesses.  Men who are physically challenged.  Men who are mentally challenged.