southward.

A transcontinental highway appeared below. It was plainly marked by the
headlights of more than usually heavy traffic on it. He followed that
highway.

Fran rode in a sort of stilly rapture. Soames said:

"Not worried, Fran?"

Fran shook his head. Then, boy-like, he turned on the transistor radio
to show his nonchalance. A voice spoke. He'd have shifted to music but
Soames caught a word or two.

"Hold it!" he commanded. "Put it so I can hear!"

Fran raised the volume and held the small radio so Soames could hear it
above the motor-noise.

What he heard, at this moment, was the official United States broadcast
announcing the ending of all real menace of atomic attack. By a
fortunate freak of fate, somebody in authority realized that it was more
important to get the news out than to make a professionalized production
of it. So a tired but confident voice said very simply that American
technicians seemed to have solved the problem of defense attack by
atomic bombs and guided missiles. There had been, the voice said
steadily, recent marked improvements in electric induction furnaces. The
basic principle of an induction furnace was the evolution of heat in the
material it was desired to melt, instead of merely in a container for
the stuff that was to be melted. Within the past four days induction
furnaces of a new type had proved able to induce heat in chosen objects
up to miles. It had been expected to smelt metal ore in the veins in
which it was found, and to make mines yield their product as metal
without digging up and puttering with useless rock. But now this
apparatus had been combined with radar.

When a radar detected a missile or an enemy plane, the broadcast said
carefully, an induction furnace of the new type was turned upon the
plane or missile. The effect was exactly that of enclosing the missile
in a burning blast-furnace. It melted. The most careful tests assured
America, then, that any city protected by radar-controlled
remote-induction furnaces was safe against atomic attack and its dread
destruction.

And at the time of this broadcast, every major center of population in
the United States was already protected by the new defense-system. The
cities which had been most vulnerable were now the safest places in the
nation. And it was found, added the contented voice, that atomic bombs
were not detonated by the induction fields. The induced currents seemed
to freeze firing mechanisms. It