ain," MacHeath said. "Balancing
these babies so that they work properly is hard enough for a deuteron
accelerator, but the Monster here is ten times as touchy."

Nordred nodded absently. "I know. But our work can't be done with
anything less." Nordred actually knew less about the engineering
details of the big accelerator than anyone else on the project; he was
primarily a philosopher-mathematician, and only secondarily a
physicist. He was theoretically in charge of the project, but the
actual experimentation was done by the other four men; Drs. Roger
Kent, Paul Luvochek, Solomon Bessermann, and Konrad Bern. These four
and their assistants set up and ran off the experiments designed to
test Dr. Nordred's theories.

MacHeath picked up his instrument case again, and the three men went
out of the gun chamber, into the outer room, and then started up the
spiral stairway that led to the surface, talking as they went. But the
apparent conversation had little to do with the instruction that
MacHeath was giving Griffin as they climbed.

So when MacHeath stopped suddenly and patted at his coverall pockets,
Griffin was ready for the words that came next.

"Damn!" MacHeath said. "I've left my notebook. Will you go down and
get it for me, Bill?"

Dr. Nordred had neither understood nor noticed the actual
instructions:

"Bill, as soon as I give you an excuse, get back down there and check
that gun chamber. Give it a thorough going-over. I don't really think
you'll find a thing, but I don't want to take any chances at this
stage of the game."

"Right," said Griffin, starting back down the stairway.

MacHeath and Dr. Nordred went on climbing.

* * * * *

David MacHeath sat at a table in the project's cafeteria, absently
stirring his coffee, and trying to look professionally modest while
Dr. Luvochek and Dr. Bessermann alternately praised him for his work.

Luvochek, a tubby little butterball of a man, whose cherubic face
would have made him look almost childlike if it weren't for the blue
of his jaw, said: "You and those two men of yours have really done a
marvelous job in the past four days, Mr. MacHeath--really marvelous."

"I'll say," Bessermann chimed in. "I was getting pretty tired of
looking at burned-out equipment and spending three-quarters of my time
putting in replacement parts and wielding a soldering gun." Bessermann
was leaner than Luvochek, but, like his brother scientist, he