ays a place for Judas, at any
table."

* * * * *

The MacLeod Team dined together, apart from their assistants and
technicians and students. This was no snobbish attempt at
class-distinction: matters of Team policy were often discussed at the
big round table, and the more confidential details of their work. People
who have only their knowledge and their ideas to sell are wary about
bandying either loosely, and the six men and three women who faced each
other across the twelve-foot diameter of the teakwood table had no other
stock-in-trade.

They were nine people of nine different nationalities, or they were nine
people of the common extra-nationality of science. That Duncan MacLeod,
their leader, had grown up in the Transvaal and his wife had been born
in the Swedish university town of Upsala was typical not only of their
own group but of the hundreds of independent research-teams that had
sprung up after the Second World War. The scientist-adventurer may have
been born of the relentless struggle for scientific armament supremacy
among nations and the competition for improved techniques among
industrial corporations during the late 1950s and early '60s, but he had
been begotten when two masses of uranium came together at the top of a
steel tower in New Mexico in 1945. And, because scientific research is
pre-eminently a matter of pooling brains and efforts, the independent
scientists had banded together into teams whose leaders acquired power
greater than that of any _condottiere_ captain of Renaissance Italy.

Duncan MacLeod, sitting outwardly relaxed and merry and secretly
watchful and bitterly sad, was such a free-captain of science. One by
one, the others had rallied around him, not because he was a greater
physicist than they, but because he was a bolder, more clever, less
scrupulous adventurer, better able to guide them through the maze of
international power-politics and the no less ruthless if less nakedly
violent world of Big Industry.

There was his wife, Karen Hilquist, the young metallurgist who, before
she was twenty-five, had perfected a new hardening process for SKF and
an incredibly tough gun-steel for the Bofors works. In the few minutes
since they had returned to Team Center, she had managed to change her
coveralls for a skirt and blouse, and do something intriguing with her
hair.

And there was Kato Sugihara, looking younger than his twenty-eight
years, who had be