prises, whose president, Blake Hartley, had later become President
of the United States. The hard-won victory over a seemingly insoluble
problem in the Belgian Congo uranium mines----He thought, too, of the
dangers they had faced together, in a world where soldiers must use the
weapons of science and scientists must learn the arts of violence. Of
the treachery of the Islamic Kaliphate, for whom they had once worked;
of the intrigues and plots which had surrounded them in Spain; of the
many attempted kidnappings and assassinations; of the time in Basra when
they had fought with pistols and tommy guns and snatched-up clubs and
flasks of acid to defend their laboratories.

A good team--before the rot of treason had touched it. He could almost
smell the putrid stench of it, and yet, as he glanced from face to face,
he could not guess the traitor. And he had so little time--

* * * * *

Kato Sugihara's voice rose to dominate the murmur of conversation around
the table.

"I think I am getting somewhere on my photon-neutrino-electron
interchange-cycle," he announced. "And I think it can be correlated to
the collapsed-matter research."

"So?" von Heldenfeld looked up in interest. "And not with the problem of
what goes on in the 'hot layer' surrounding the Earth?"

"No, Suzanne talked me out of that idea," the Japanese replied. "That's
just a secondary effect of the effect of cosmic rays and solar
radiations on the order of particles existing at that level. But I think
that I have the key to the problem of collapsing matter to plate the
hull of the spaceship."

"That's interesting," Sir Neville Lawton commented. "How so?"

"Well, you know what happens when a photon comes in contact with the
atomic structure of matter," Kato said. "There may be an elastic
collision, in which the photon merely bounces off. Macroscopically,
that's the effect we call reflection of light. Or there may be an
inelastic collision, when the photon hits an atom and knocks out an
electron--the old photoelectric effect. Or, the photon may be retained
for a while and emitted again relatively unchanged--the effect observed
in luminous paint. Or, the photon may penetrate, undergo a change to a
neutrino, and either remain in the nucleus of the atom or pass through
it, depending upon a number of factors. All this, of course, is old
stuff; even the photon-neutrino interchange has been known since the
mid-'50s, when the Gamo