Galvez
asked. "And perhaps say a few words for telecast? This last is most
important; we can't explain too many times the purpose of this
experiment. There is still much hostility, arising from fear that we are
testing a nuclear weapon."

The press and telecast services were well represented; there were close
to a hundred correspondents, from all over South America, from South
Africa and Australia, even one from Ceylon. They had three trucks, with
mobile telecast pickups, and when they saw who was approaching, they
released the two rocketry experts they had been quizzing and pounced on
the new victims.

Was there any possibility that negative-proton matter might be used as a
weapon?

"Anything can be used as a weapon; you could stab a man to death with
that lead pencil you're using," Pitov replied. "But I doubt if
negamatter will ever be so used. We're certainly not working on weapons
design here. We started, six years ago, with the ability to produce
negative protons, reverse-spin neutrons, and positrons, and the
theoretical possibility of assembling them into negamatter. We have just
gotten a fifty kilogramme mass of nega-iron assembled. In those six
years, we had to invent all our techniques, and design all our
equipment. If we'd been insane enough to want to build a nuclear weapon,
after what we went through up North, we could have done so from memory,
and designed a better--which is to say a worse--one from memory in a few
days."

"Yes, and building a negamatter bomb for military purposes would be like
digging a fifty foot shaft to get a rock to bash somebody's head in,
when you could do the job better with the shovel you're digging with,"
Richardson added. "The time, money, energy and work we put in on this
thing would be ample to construct twenty thermonuclear bombs. And that's
only a small part of it." He went on to tell them about the magnetic
bottle inside the rocket's warhead, mentioning how much electric current
was needed to keep up the magnetic field that insulated the negamatter
from contact with posimatter.

"Then what was the purpose of this experiment, Doctor Richardson?"

"Oh, we were just trying to find out a few basic facts about natural
structure. Long ago, it was realized that the nucleonic
particles--protons, neutrons, mesons and so on--must have structure of
their own. Since we started constructing negative-proton matter, we've
found out a few things about nucleonic structure. Some rathe