limbed slowly out of his seat. There was a car waiting for him at
the airfield, though, and that seemed to presage a smooth time; Malone
remembered calling Dr. O'Connor the night before, and congratulated
himself on his foresight.

Unfortunately, when he reached the main gate of the high double fence
that surrounded the more than ninety square miles of United States
Laboratories, he found out that entrance into that sanctum sanctorum of
Security wasn't as easy as he'd imagined--not even for an FBI man. His
credentials were checked with the kind of minute care Malone had always
thought people reserved for disputed art masterpieces, and it was with a
great show of reluctance that the Special Security guards passed him
inside as far as the office of the Chief Security Officer.

There, the Chief Security Officer himself, a man who could have doubled
for Torquemada, eyed Malone with ill-concealed suspicion while he called
Burris at FBI headquarters back in Washington.

Burris identified Malone on the video screen and the Chief Security
Officer, looking faintly disappointed, stamped the agent's pass and
thanked the FBI chief. Malone had the run of the place.

Then he had to find a courier jeep. The Westinghouse division, it
seemed, was a good two miles away.

As Malone knew perfectly well, the main portion of the entire Yucca
Flats area was devoted solely to research on the new space drive which
was expected to make the rocket as obsolete as the blunderbuss--at least
as far as space travel was concerned. Not, Malone thought uneasily, that
the blunderbuss had ever been used for space travel, but--

He got off the subject hurriedly. The jeep whizzed by buildings, most of
them devoted to aspects of the non-rocket drive. The other projects
based at Yucca Flats had to share what space was left--and that
included, of course, the Westinghouse research project.

It turned out to be a single, rather small white building with a fence
around it. The fence bothered Malone a little, but there was no need to
worry; this time he was introduced at once into Dr. O'Connor's office.
It was paneled in wallpaper manufactured to look like pine, and the
telepathy expert sat behind a large black desk bigger than any Malone
had ever seen in the FBI offices. There wasn't a scrap of paper on the
desk; its surface was smooth and shiny, and behind it the nearly
transparent Dr. Thomas O'Connor was close to invisible.

He looked, in person, just ab