said General Webb, re-opening the door at their backs.
He was just about to step through when, with a quick blush of
mortification, he remembered the "Top Secret" earplugs. Hastily,
averting his face lest the other man see his embarrassment, he returned
his plugs to their box, and did the same with Whitlow's.

Whitlow was glad when the door closed behind them.

"My office is this way," said Webb, striding off in a stiff military
manner.

Whitlow, with a forlorn shrug, could do nothing but clutch his brief
case and follow.

* * * * *

"It's this way," General Webb began, once they were seated uncomfortably
in his office. From a pocket in his khaki jacket, Webb had produced a
big-bowled calabash pipe, and was puffing its noxious gray fumes in all
directions while he spoke. "Up until the late fifties, war was a simple
thing ..."

Oh, not the March of Science Speech! said Whitlow to himself. He knew it
by heart. It was the talk of the Capitol, and the nightmare of military
strategists. As the general's voice droned on and on, Whitlow barely
listened. The general, Top Secret or no Top Secret, was divulging
nothing that wasn't common knowledge from the ruins of Philadelphia to
the great Hollywood crater ...

All at once, weapons had gotten _too_ good. That was the whole problem.
Wars, no matter what the abilities of the death-dealing guns, cannon,
rifles, rockets or whatever, needed one thing on the battlefield that
could not be turned out in a factory: Men.

In order to win a war, a country must be vanquished. In order to
vanquish a country, soldiers must be landed. And that was precisely
wherein the difficulty lay: landing the soldiers.

Ships were nearly obsolete in this respect. Landing barges could be
blown out of the water as fast as they were let down into it.

Paratroops were likewise hopeless. The slow-moving troop-carrying planes
daren't even peek above the enemy's horizon without chancing an
onslaught of "thinking" rockets that would stay on their trail until
they were molten cinders falling into the sea.

So someone invented the supersonic carrier. This was pretty good,
allowing the planes to come in high and fast over the enemy's territory,
as fast as the land-to-air missiles themselves. The only drawback was
that the first men to try parachuting at that speed were battered to
confetti by the slipstream of their own carriers. That would not do.

Next, someone thought