Hugh was here."

Myra laughed lightly--a calculated laugh, meant to disguise the gravity
of this terrible thing. "That's not very patriotic, Jim. If that was the
bomb, Hugh will be kept busy making other bombs to send back to them."

"But he'd know. I'll bet he could tell just by the sound of it." Jim
smiled quietly in the darkness--proudly. It wasn't everybody who had a
genius for a brother. A nuclear scientist didn't happen in every family.
Hugh was somebody to be proud of.

They turned on the radio and sat huddled in front of it. The tubes
warmed with maddening slowness. Then there came the deliberately
impersonal voice of the announcer:

"--on the strength of reports now in, it appears the enemy bungled
badly. Instead of crippling the nation, they succeeded only in alerting
it. The bombs--at this time there appear to have been five of them
dropped--formed a straight north-south line across western United
States. One detonated close to the Idaho-Utah line. The other four were
placed at almost equi-distant points to the south--the fifth bomb,
according to first reports, exploding in a Mexican desert. We have been
informed that Calas, Utah, a town of nine hundred persons, has been
completely annihilated. For further reports, keep tuned to this
station."

[Illustration: _The fifth "one" exploded in the Mexican desert._]

A dance band cut in. Jim got up from his chair. "They certainly did
bungle," he said. "Imagine wasting four atom bombs like that."

Myra got up also. "Would you like some coffee?"

"That'd be a good idea. I don't feel like going back to bed. I want to
listen for more reports."

But there were no more reports. An hour passed. Another and another. Jim
spun the dials and got either silence or the cheerful blatherings of
some inane disc jockey who prattled on as though nothing had happened.

Finally Jim snapped the set off. "Censorship," he said. "Now we're going
to see what it's really like."

In the morning they gathered again in groups--the villagers in this
little community of five hundred, and discussed the shape of things to
come, as they visualized them.

"It'll take a little time to get into action," old Sam Bennett said.
"Even expecting it, and with how fast things move these days--it'll take
time."

"If they invade us--come down from the north--you think the government
will let us know they're coming?"

"You can't tell. Censorship is a funny thing. In the last war, we knew
more