to resume the communication that had been broken off.
Suspecting that Sergeant Bellews had shifted controls, they essayed to
shift them back. The communicator which was Betsy's factory twin went
into sine-wave standby-modulation, and suddenly smoked all over and was
wrecked. The wave-generator went into hysterics and produced nothing
whatever. Then there was nothing to do but pull Sergeant Bellews out of
the clink and order him to do the whole business all over again.

"I can't," said Sergeant Bellews indignantly. "It can't be done. Those
guys are busy buildin' a transmitter according to the diagram Doc Graves
gave them. They won't pay no attention to anything until they'd tried to
chat with their great-great-great-grand-children in 3120. They were
phonys, anyhow! Pretendin' to be in 2180 and not knowin' what Mahon
units could do!"

Lecky and Graves and Howell were even less satisfactory. They couldn't
pretend even to try what the questioning-teams from the Pentagon wanted
them to do. And Betsy remained silent, receiving nothing, and Gus and Al
waited meditatively for something to unscramble, and nothing turned up.

And then, at 3:00 P.M. Greenwich mean time, on August 9, 1972, nearly
every operating communicator in the fringe of free nations around the
territory of the Union of Communist Republics--all communicators blew
out.

There were only four men in the world who really knew why--Sergeant
Bellews and Lecky and Graves and Howell. They knew that somewhere behind
the Iron Curtain a twenty-kilowatt transmitter had been turned on. It
produced a wave of the type and with the characteristics that would have
been produced by a transmitter built from the diagram sent through Betsy
and Al and Gus for people in the United States to build. Obviously, it
had been built from Graves' diagram broadcast to somewhere else and it
broadcast what the United States had been urged to broadcast.

* * * * *

It blew itself out instantly, of course. The wave it produced would stop
any dynamic system at once, including its own. But it hit Stockholm and
traffic jammed as the dynamic systems of cars in operation were
destroyed. In Gibraltar, the signal-systems of the Rock went dead. All
around the fringe of the armed Communist republics machines stopped and
communications ended and very many persons with heart conditions died
very quietly. Because their dynamic systems were least stable. But
healthy peopl