eading across the
continent toward Nevada. He had gone home to sleep, and he'd had to
wake up to get on the plane, and now here he was, waking up again. It
seemed, somehow, like a vicious circle.

The engines hummed gently as they pushed the big ship through the
middle stratosphere's thinly distributed molecules. Malone looked out
at the purple-dark sky and set himself to think out his problem again.

He was still mulling things over when the ship lowered its landing
gear and rolled to a stop on the big field near Yucca Flats. Malone
sighed and climbed slowly out of his seat. There was a car waiting for
him at the airfield, though, and that seemed to presage a smooth time;
Malone remembered calling Dr. O'Connor the night before, and
congratulated himself on his foresight.

Unfortunately, when he reached the main gate of the high double fence
that surrounded the more than ninety square miles of United States
Laboratories, he found out that entrance into that sanctum sanctorum
of Security wasn't as easy as he'd imagined--not even for an FBI man.
His credentials were checked with the kind of minute care Malone had
always thought people reserved for disputed art masterpieces, and it
was with a great show of reluctance that the Special Security guards
passed him inside as far as the office of the Chief Security Officer.

There, the Chief Security Officer himself, a man who could have
doubled for Torquemada, eyed Malone with ill-concealed suspicion while
he called Burris at FBI headquarters back in Washington.

Burris identified Malone on the video screen and the Chief Security
Officer, looking faintly disappointed, stamped the agent's pass and
thanked the FBI chief. Malone had the run of the place.

Then he had to find a courier jeep. The Westinghouse division, it
seemed, was a good two miles away.

As Malone knew perfectly well, the main portion of the entire Yucca
Flats area was devoted solely to research on the new space drive which
was expected to make the rocket as obsolete as the blunderbuss--at
least as far as space travel was concerned. Not, Malone thought
uneasily, that the blunderbuss had ever been used for space travel,
but--

He got off the subject hurriedly. The jeep whizzed by buildings, most
of them devoted to aspects of the non-rocket drive. The other projects
based at Yucca Flats had to share what space was left--and that
included, of course, the Westinghouse research project.

It turned out to be