th the risks involved."

"There was China, and India. If your country and mine wiped each other
out, they could go back to the old ways and the old traditions. Or
Japan, or the Moslem States. In the end, they all went down along with
us, but what criminal ever expects to fall?"

"We have too many suspects, and the trail's too cold, Alexis. That
rocket wouldn't have had to have been launched anywhere in the Northern
Hemisphere. For instance, our friends here in the Argentine have been
doing very well by themselves since _El Coloso del Norte_ went down."

And there were the Australians, picking themselves up bargains in
real-estate in the East Indies at gun-point, and there were the Boers,
trekking north again, in tanks instead of ox-wagons. And Brazil, with a
not-too-implausible pretender to the Braganza throne, calling itself the
Portuguese Empire and looking eastward. And, to complete the picture,
here were Professor Doctor Lee Richardson and Comrade Professor Alexis
Petrovitch Pitov, getting ready to test a missile with a
matter-annihilation warhead.

No. This thing just wasn't a weapon.

A jeep came around the corner, lighting the dark roadway between the
bungalows, its radio on and counting down--_Twenty two minutes. Twenty
one fifty nine, fifty eight, fifty seven_--It came to a stop in front of
their bungalow, at exactly Minus Two Hours, Twenty One Minutes, Fifty
Four Seconds. The driver called out in Spanish:

"Doctor Richardson; Doctor Pitov! Are you ready?"

"Yes, ready. We're coming."

They both got to their feet, Richardson pulling himself up reluctantly.
The older you get, the harder it is to leave a comfortable chair. He
settled himself beside his colleague and former enemy, and the jeep
started again, rolling between the buildings of the living-quarters area
and out onto the long, straight road across the pampas toward the
distant blaze of electric lights.

He wondered why he had been thinking so much, lately, about the Auburn
Bomb. He'd questioned, at times, indignantly, of course, whether Russia
had launched it--but it wasn't until tonight, until he had heard what
Pitov had had to say, that he seriously doubted it. Pitov wouldn't lie
about it, and Pitov would have been in a position to have known the
truth, if the missile had been launched from Russia. Then he stopped
thinking about what was water--or blood--a long time over the dam.

The special policeman at the entrance to the launching site