y new defense
ideas?"

"Plenty. Did you get any further appropriations from the IP
Appropriations Board?"

McLaurin looked sour. "No. The dear taxpayers might object, and those
thickheaded, clogged rockets on the Board can't see your data on the
Stranger. They gave me just ten millions, and that only because you
demonstrated you could shoot every living thing out of the latest IP
cruiser with that neutron gun of yours. By the way, they may kick when I
don't install more than a few of those."

"Let 'em. You can stall for a few months. You'll need that money more
for other purposes. You've installed that paraffin lining?"

"Yes--I got a report on that of 'finished' last week. How have you made
out?"

Buck Kendall's face fell. "Not so hot. Devin's been the biggest help--he
did most of the work on that neutron gun really--"

"After," McLaurin interrupted, "you told him how."

"--but we're pretty well stuck now, it seems. You'll be off duty
tomorrow evening, can't you drop around to the lab? We're going to try
out a new system for releasing atomic energy."

"Isn't that a pretty faint hope? We've been trying to get it for three
centuries now, and haven't yet. What chance at it within a year or
so?--which is the time you allow yourself before the Stranger returns."

"It is, I'll admit that. But there's another factor, not to be
forgotten. The data we got from correlating those 'misreadings' from the
various IP posts mean a lot. We are working on an entirely different
trail now. You come on out, and you can see our new apparatus. They are
working on tremendous voltages, and hoping to smash the thing by a
brutal bombardment of terrific voltage. We're trying, thanks to the
results of those instruments, to get results with small, terrifically
intense fields."

"How do you know that's their general system?"

"They left traces on the records of the post instruments. These records
show such intensities as we never got. They have atomic energy,
necessarily, and they might have had material energy, actual destruction
of matter, but apparently, from the field readings it's the former. To
be able to make those tremendous hops, light-years in length, they
needed a real store of energy. They have accumulators, of course, but I
don't think they could store enough power by the system they use to do
it."

"Well, how's your trick 'bank' out on Luna, despite its twelve-foot
walls, going to stand an atomic explosion?"

"More pr