is afternoon. But there's no relaxation for Major
Holt. Or for me."

Joe said unhopefully: "I'm sure Sally'd be glad if you came with us."

Major Holt's plain, unglamorous assistant shook her head.

"I haven't had a day off since the work began here," she said frowning.
"The Major depends on me. Nobody else could do what I do! You're going
to Red Canyon Lake?"

"Yes," agreed Joe. "Sally thought it might be pleasant."

"It's terribly dry and arid here," said Miss Ross sadly. "That's the
only body of water in a hundred miles or more. I hope it's pretty there.
I've never seen it."

She handed Joe back his original memo from the facsimile machine. An
exact copy of his written list, in his handwriting, was now in existence
more than fifteen hundred miles away, and would arrive at the Kenmore
Precision Tool plant within a matter of hours. There could be no
question of errors in transmission! It had to be right!

Sally came out, smiled at her father's secretary, and led Joe down to
the entrance.

"I have the car," she said cheerfully, "and there'll be a lunch basket
waiting for us at the house. I agreed that the lake was too cold for
swimming, though. It is. Snow water feeds it. But it's nice to look at."

They went out the door, and the workers on the Platform were just
beginning to pile into the waiting fleet of busses. But the black car
was waiting, too. Joe opened the door and Sally handed him the key. She
regarded the men swarming on the busses.

"There'll be bulletins all over Bootstrap," she observed, "saying that
Braun tried to dust-bomb the Shed. They'll say that he may have carried
the cobalt about with him, and so he may have burned other people--in a
restaurant, a movie theater, anywhere--while he was carrying the dust
and dying without knowing it. So everybody's supposed to report to the
hospital for a check-up for radiation burns. Some people may really have
them. But Dad thinks that since you weren't burned, Braun didn't carry
it around. If anyone is burned, it'll be the person who brought the
cobalt here to give him. And--well--he'll turn up because everybody
does, and because he's burned he'll be asked plenty of questions."

Joe stepped on the starter. Then he pressed the accelerator and the car
sped forward.

They stopped at the house in the officers'-quarters area on the other
side of the Shed. Sally picked up the lunch basket that her father's
housekeeper had packed on telephoned instructions.