ent here since 1962,
when the last coal-burning power plant was dismantled. Knock this plant
out and you darken every house and office and factory and street in the
area. You immobilize the elevators--think what that would mean in lower
and midtown Manhattan alone. And the subways. And the new endless-belt
conveyors that handle eighty per cent of the city's freight traffic. And
the railroads--there aren't a dozen steam or Diesel locomotives left in
the whole area. And the pump stations for water and gas and fuel oil.
And seventy per cent of the space-heating is electric, now. Why, you
can't imagine what it'd be like. It's too gigantic. But what you can
imagine would be a nightmare.

"You know, it wasn't so long ago, when every home lighted and heated
itself, and every little industry was a self-contained unit, that a fool
couldn't do great damage unless he inherited a throne or was placed in
command of an army, and that didn't happen nearly as often as our
leftist social historians would like us to think. But today, everything
we depend upon is centralized, and vulnerable to blunder-damage. Even
our food--remember that poisoned soft-drink horror in Chicago, in 1963;
three thousand hospitalized and six hundred dead because of one man's
stupid mistake at a bottling plant." He shook himself slightly, as
though to throw off some shadow that had fallen over him, and looked at
his watch. "Sixteen hundred. How did you get here? Fly your own plane?"

"No; I came by T.W.A. from Pittsburgh. I have a room at the new Midtown
City hotel, on Forty-seventh Street: I had my luggage sent on there from
the airport and came out on the Long Island subway."

"Fine. I have a room at Midtown City, myself, though I sleep here about
half the time." He nodded toward a door on the left. "Suppose we go in
and have dinner together. This cafeteria, here, is a horrible place.
It's run by a dietitian instead of a chef, and everything's so
white-enamel antiseptic that I swear I smell belladonna-icthyol ointment
every time I go in the place. Wait here till I change clothes."

* * * * *

At the Long Island plant, no one was concerned about espionage--neither
the processes nor the equipment used there were secret--but the
countersabotage security was fantastically thorough. Every person or
scrap of material entering the reactor area was searched; the
life-history of every man and woman employed there was known back to th