r arms full
of papers in folders, collided with him; the load of papers flew in
all directions. He stooped to help her pick them up.

"Oh, general! Isn't it wonderful?" she cried. "I just can't believe
it!"

"Isn't what wonderful?" he asked.

"Oh, don't you know? They've got it!"

"Huh? They have?" He gathered up the last of the big envelopes and
gave them to her. "When?"

"Just half an hour ago. And to think, those books were around here all
the time, and.... Oh, I've got to run!" She disappeared into the lift.

Inside the office, one of Pickering's engineers was sitting on the
middle of his spinal column, a stenograph-phone in one hand and a book
in the other. Once in a while, he would say something into the
mouthpiece of the phone. Two other nuclear engineers had similar books
spread out on a desk in front of them; they were making notes and
looking up references in the Nuclear Engineers' Handbook, and making
calculations with their slide-rules. There was a huddle around the
drafting-boards, where two more such books were in use.

"Well, what's happened?" he demanded, catching Pickering by the arm as
he rushed from one group to another.

"Ha! We have it!" Pickering cried. "Everything we need! Look!"

He had another of the books under his arm. He held it out to von
Schlichten, and von Schlichten suddenly felt sicker than he had ever
felt since, at the age of fourteen, he had gotten drunk for the first
time. He had seen men crack up under intolerable strain before, but
this was the first time he had seen a whole roomful of men blow their
tops in the same manner.

The book was a novel--a jumbo-size historical novel, of some seven or
eight hundred pages. Its dust-jacket bore a slightly-more-than-bust-length
picture of a young lady with crimson hair and green eyes and jade earrings
and a plunging--not to say power-diving--neckline that left her
affiliation with the class of Mammalia in no doubt whatever. In the
background, a mushroom-topped smoke-column rose, and away from it
something intended to be a four-motor propeller-driven bomber of the First
Century was racing madly. The title, he saw, was _Dire Dawn_, and the
author was one Hildegarde Hernandez.

"Well, it has a picture of an A-bomb explosion an it," he agreed.

"It has more than that; it has the whole business. Case
specifications, tampers, charge design, detonating device, everything.
Why, end-papers even have diagrams: copies of the original
Na