below his laboratory windows workers and
technicians streamed toward the gates, checking out for the day through
the usual mass of red tape, passes, and Geiger tests. Lights were
flicking on in the long East Wing Dormitory across the quadrangle, and
the mess hall, where he had recently eaten a tasteless supper, was
lighted.

Shortly after restrictions had really begun to tighten up last fall,
he had written to a worker who had published making a minor correction
in his calculations and adding some suggestions arising from his own
research. A week later his letter was returned completely censored,
stamped "Security-Violation." It was that evasive Gordon's fault. He
knew it, but he couldn't prove it. Collins suspected that the man was
not a top-notch researcher and so was in administration. Perhaps Gordon
was jealous of his own work.

Even the Journals were drying up. Endless innocuous papers recalculating
the values of harmless constants and other such nonsense were all that
was being published. They were hardly worth reading. Others were feeling
the throttling effects of security measures, and isolated, lone
researchers were slowing down, listless and anemic from the loss of
the life blood of science, the free interchange of information.

The present research job he was doing was coming slowly, but what
difference did it make? It would never be published. Probably it would
be filed with a Department of Defense code number as Research Report
DDNE-42 dash-dash-dash. And there it would remain, top-secret, guarded,
unread, useless. Somewhere in the desk drawers was the directive worded
in the stiff military manner describing the procedures for clearing
papers for publication. When he had first come here, he had tried that.

"Well, good, Collins," Gordon, the Division Administrator, had said,
"glad to check it over. Always happy when one of our men has something
for publication. Gives the Division a good name. I'll let you know, but
we have to be careful. Security you know."

Somehow he had never heard. The first time he had made a pest of himself
with Gordon who was polite, evasive, always plausible. Gordon,
Gordon--it was becoming an obsession with him he knew, but the man
appeared at every turn. He personified the system.

In the past months his work had seemed to clog up in details and slow
down. The early days of broad, rapid outlines and facile sketching in of
details were gone. Now the endless indignities, invas