It had a
"sinister" component amounting to approximately one one-hundred-thousandth
of one per cent. On the average, one atom out of every ten million in the
universe was an atom of antimatter. The distribution was unequal of course;
antimatter could not exist in contact with ordinary matter. Most of it was
distributed throughout interstellar space in the form of individual atoms,
freely floating in space, a long way from any large mass of normal matter.

But that minute fraction of a per cent was enough to show that the
known universe was not totally Einsteinian. In a purely Einsteinian
universe, antigravity was impossible, but if the equations of Dr.
Theodore Nordred were actually a closer approximation to true reality
than those of Einstein, then antigravity _might_ be a practical
reality.

And that was the problem the Redford Research Team was working on. It
was a parallel project to the interstellar drive problem, being
carried on elsewhere.

* * * * *

The "pet spy," as Taggert had called him, was Dr. Konrad Bern, a
middle-aged Negro from Tanganyika, who was convinced that only under
Communism could the colored races of the world achieve the
technological organization and living standard of the white man. He
had been trained as a "sleeper"; not even the exhaustive
investigations of the FBI had turned up any relationship between Bern
and the Soviets. It had taken the telepathic probing of the S.M.M.R.
agents to uncover his real purposes. Known, he constituted no danger.

There was no denying that he was a highly competent, if not brilliant,
physicist. And, since it was quite impossible for him to get any
information on the Redford Project into the hands of the
opposition--it was no longer fashionable to call Communists "the
enemy"--there was no reason why he shouldn't be allowed to contribute
to the American efforts to bridge space.

Three times in the five months since Bern had joined the project,
agents of the Soviet government had made attempts to contact the
physicist. Three times the FBI, warned by S.M.M.R. agents, had quietly
blocked the contact. Konrad Bern had been effectively isolated.

But, at the project site itself, equipment failure had become
increasingly more frequent, all out of proportion to the normal
accident rate in any well-regulated laboratory. The work of the
project had practically come to a standstill; the ultra-secret project
reports to the President