he background, a
mushroom-topped smoke-column rose, and away from it something intended to
be a four-motor propeller-driven bomber of the First Century was racing
madly. The title, he saw, was _Dire Dawn_, and the author was one
Hildegarde Hernandez.

"Well, it has a picture of an A-bomb explosion on it," he agreed.

"It has more than that; it has the whole business. Case
specifications, tampers, charge design, detonating device, everything.
Why, the end-papers even have diagrams, copies of the original
Nagasaki-bomb drawings. Look."

Von Schlichten looked. He had no more than the average intelligent
layman's knowledge of nuclear physics--enough to recharge or repair a
conversion-unit--but the drawings looked authentic enough. They seemed
to be copies of ancient blueprints, lettered in First Century English,
with Lingua Terra translations added, and marked TOP SECRET and U.S.
ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS and MANHATTAN ENGINEERING DISTRICT.

"And look at this!" Pickering opened at a marked page and showed it to
him. "And this!" He opened where another slip of paper had been
inserted. "Everything we want to know, practically."

"I don't get this." He wasn't sick, anymore, just bewildered. "I read
some reviews of this thing. All the reviewers panned hell out of
it--'World War II Through a Bedroom Keyhole'; 'Henty in Black Lace
Panties'--that sort of thing."

"Yeh, yeh, sure," Pickering agreed. "But this Hernandez had illusions
of being a great serious historical novelist, see. She won't try to
write a book till she's put in years of research--actually, about six
months' research by a herd of librarians and college-juniors and other
such literary coolies--and she boasts that she never yet has been
caught in an error of historical background detail.

"Well, this opus is about the old Manhattan Project. The heroine is a
sort of super-Mata-Hari, who is, alternately and sometimes
simultaneously, in the pay of the Nazis, the Soviets, the Vatican,
Chiang Kai-Shek, the Japanese Emperor, and the Jewish International
Bankers, and she sleeps with everybody but Joe Stalin and Mao
Tse-tung, and of course, she is in on every step of the A-bomb
project. She even manages to stow away on the _Enola Gay_, with the
help of a general she's spent fifty incandescent pages seducing.

"In order to tool up for this production-job, La Hernandez did her
researching just where Lourenco Gomes probably did his--University of
Montevideo Library. Sh