The Great Galactic War was over. The treaties had been signed, the borders redrawn, reparations imposed and agreed to. Side-agreements between all of the major powers limiting warship size and ordinance and been drafted and all involved had signed them.

The victors were elated. They had achieved their war-goals and put an end to the bloodiest interstellar war in recorded history.

The defeated looked downtrodden. Their empires lay in ruin, their governments in tatters, their people on the edge of starvation.

The humans, who had acted as the scrupulously neutral part to the whole sordid affair, promptly opened negotiations with the defeated faction.

The victors looked stunned. They had expected the greedy humans to invest in their empires, buy their products, and fuel their economies.

The defeated were just as shocked when the humans didn't seek further damages but instead offered lucrative investments into infrastructure and agriculture projects. Oh, they would see profits, as any economist could calculate, but not huge ones. Nor would the humans dominate the economies of the defeated, as every negotiation included an iron-bound condition that any such investment must have a local partner, resident of and beholden to the local authority, and that any human investors would be automatically bought out by a portion of the profits of their joint ventures.

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The victors were shocked. No neutral power had ever not sought every advantage they could get when offered an opening of such magnitude.

The defeated were even more shocked when they realized they couldn't discard that ironclad condition in exchange for better terms on the investments.

Both parties sent members of their delegations to meet with the human contingent to ask and plead for an explanation.

The human minister who met them was bemused at first, but then agreed to produce an explanation, if they would give him a day or so for it to be translated into all of the appropriate languages. The delegates from the victors and defeated agreed then descended upon the cocktail circuit to drink and gossip.

When they returned the next day the human minister presented each of them with a chip folio. Inside were dozens of chips, each one neatly labeled and sorted, all of them in the native language of the recipient.

The first chip in every folio was labeled 'The Treaty of Versailles and Its Long-Term Effects.'

Two months later, time enough for those chip folios to travel back to homeworlds and for leaders to view them in person, the humans once again hosted a peace conference. Present once again were the victors and the defeated, with the humans once again as the scrupulous neutral, and the subject once again was the Great Galactic War.

All present had come to the same conclusion: no one wanted a Second Great Galactic War.