e even had access to the photostats of the old
U.S. data that General Lanningham brought to South America after the
debacle in the United States in A.E. 114. Those end-papers are part of
the Lanningham stuff. As far as we've been able to check
mathematically, everything is strictly authentic and practical. We'll
have to run a few more tests on the chemical-explosive charges--we
don't have any data on the exact strength of the explosives they used
then--and the tampers and detonating device will need to be tested a
little. But in about half an hour, we ought to be able to start
drawing plans for the case, and as soon as they're finished, we'll
rush them to the shipyard foundries for casting."

Von Schlichten handed the book back to Pickering, and sighed deeply.
"And I thought everybody here had gone off his rocker," he said. "We
will erect, on the ruins of Keegark, a hundred-foot statue of Senorita
Hildegarde Hernandez.... How did you get onto this?"

Pickering pointed to a young man with dull brick colored hair, who was
punching out some kind of a problem on a small computing machine.

"Piet van Reenen, over there, he has a girl-friend whose taste runs to
this sort of literary bubble-gum. She told him it was all in a book
she'd just read, and showed him. We descended in force on the bookshop
and grabbed every copy in stock. We are now running a sort of
gaseous-diffusion process, to separate the nuclear physics from the
pornography. I must say, Hildegarde has her biological data very well
in hand, too."

"I'll bet she'd have fun writing a novel about these geeks," von
Schlichten said. "Well, how soon do you think you can have a bomb
ready for us?"

"Casting the cases is going to slow us down the most," Pickering said.
"But, even with that, we ought to have one ready in three days, at the
most. By two weeks, we'll be turning them out on an assembly-line."

"I hope we don't need more than one. But you'd better produce at least
half a dozen. And have some practice-bombs made up, out of concrete or
anything, as long as they're the right weight and airfoil and have
some way of releasing smoke. Get them done as soon as you have your
case designed. We want to be able to make a couple of practice drops."

There was no use, he thought, of raising hopes which might prove
premature. He told Paula Quinton, of course, and Themistocles
M'zangwe, and, by telecast on sealed beam, King Kankad and
Air-Commodore Hargreaves. Beyond