screen, this time from close to the target. That camera wasradar-controlled; it had fastened onto the approaching missile, whichwas still invisible. The stars swung slowly across the screen untilRichardson recognized the ones he had spotted at the zenith. In amoment, now, the rocket, a hundred miles overhead, would be nosing down,and then the warhead would open and the magnetic field inside wouldalter and the mass of negamatter would be ejected.
The stars were blotted out by a sudden glow of light. Even at a hundredmiles, there was enough atmospheric density to produce considerableenergy release. Pitov, beside him, was muttering, partly in German andpartly in Russian; most of what Richardson caught was figures. Trying tocalculate how much of the mass of unnatural iron would get down for theground blast. Then the right hand screen broke into a wriggling orgy ofcolor, and at the same time every scrap of radio-transmitted apparatuseither went out or began reporting erratically. The left hand screen,connected by wiring to the pickup on the roof, was still functioning.For a moment, Richardson wondered what was going on, and then shockedrecognition drove that from his mind as he stared at theever-brightening glare in the sky.
It was the Auburn Bomb again! He was back, in memory, to the night onthe shore of Lake Ontario; the party breaking up in the early hours ofmorning; he and Janet and the people with whom they had been spending avacation week standing on the lawn as the guests were getting into theircars. And then the sudden light in the sky. The cries of surprise, andthen of alarm as it seemed to be rushing straight down upon them. He andJanet, clutching each other and staring up in terror at the fallingblaze from which there seemed no escape. Then relief, as it curved awayfrom them and fell to the south. And then the explosion, lighting thewhole southern sky.
There was a similar explosion in the screen, when the mass of nega-ironlanded--a sheet of pure white light, so bright and so quick as to almostpass above the limit of visibility, and then a moment's darkness thatwas in his stunned eyes more than in the screen, and then the risingglow of updrawn incandescent dust.
Before the sound-waves had reached them, he had been legging it into thehouse. The television had been on, and it had been acting as insanely asthe screen on his right now. He had called the State Police--thetelephones had been working all right--and told them who he was, andthey had told him to stay put and they'd send a car for him. They did,within minutes. Janet and his host and hostess had waited with him onthe lawn until it came, and after he had gotten into it, he had turnedaround and looked back through the rear window, and seen Janet standingunder the front light, holding the little dog in her arms, flopping oneof its silly little paws up and down with her hand to wave goodbye tohim.
He had seen her and the dog like that every day of his life for the lastfifteen years.
"What kind of radiation are you getting?" he could hear Alexis Pitovasking into a phone. "What? Nothing else? Oh; yes, of course. But mostlycosmic. That shouldn't last long." He turned from the phone. "A devil'sown dose of cosmic, and some gamma. It was the cosmic radiation that putthe radios and telescreens out. That's why I insisted that the droneplanes be independent of radio control."
They always got cosmic radiation from the micro-annihilations in thetest-vault. Well, now they had an idea of what produced natural cosmicrays. There must be quite a bit of negamatter and posimatter going intomutual annihilation and total energy release through the Universe.
"Of course, there were no detectors set up in advance around Auburn," hesaid. "We didn't really begin to find anything out for half an hour. Bythat time, the cosmic radiation was over and we weren't getting anythingbut gamma."
"What--What has Auburn to do--?" The Russian stopped short. "You thinkthis was the same thing?" He gave it a moment's consideration. "Lee,you're crazy! There wasn't an atom of artificial negamatter in the worldin 1969. Nobody had made any before us. We gave each other somescientific surprises, then, but nobody surprised both of us. You and I,between us, knew everything that was going on in nuclear physics in theworld. And you know as well as I do--"
A voice came out of the public-address speaker. "Some of the radioequipment around the target area, that wasn't knocked out by blast, isbeginning to function again. There is an increasingly heavy gammaradiation, but no more cosmic rays. They were all prompt radiation fromthe annihilation; the gamma is secondary effect. Wait a moment; CaptainUrquiola, of the Air Force, says that the first drone plane is about totake off."
It had been two hours after the blast that the first drones had goneover what had been Auburn, New York. He was trying to remember, asexactly as possible, what had been learned from them. Gamma radiation; agreat deal of gamma. But it didn't last long. It had been almost down toa safe level by the time the investigation had been called off, and, twomonths after there had been no more missiles, and no way of producingmore, and no targets to send them against if they'd had them, rather--hehad been back at Auburn on his hopeless quest, and there had been almostno trace of radiation. Nothing but a wide, shallow crater, almost twohundred feet in diameter and only fifteen at its deepest, already fullof water, and a circle of flattened and scattered rubble for a mile anda half all around it. He was willing to bet anything that that was whatthey'd find where the chunk of nega-iron had landed, fifty miles away onthe pampas.
Well, the first drone ought to be over the target area before long, andat least one of the balloons that had been sent up was reporting itscourse by radio. The radios in the others were silent, and the recordingcounters had probably jammed in all of them. There'd be something ofinterest when the first drone came back. He dragged his mind back to thepresent, and went to work with Alexis Pitov.
They were at it all night, checking, evaluating, making sure that themasses of data that were coming in were being promptly processed forprogramming the computers. At each of the increasingly frequentcoffee-breaks, he noticed Pitov looking curiously. He said nothing,however, until, long after dawn, they stood outside the bunker, waitingfor the jeep that would take them back to their bungalow and watchingthe line of trucks--Argentine army engineers, locally hired laborers,load after load of prefab-huts and equipment--going down toward thetarget-area, where they would be working for the next week.
"Lee, were you serious?" Pitov asked. "I mean, about this being like theone at Auburn?"
"It was exactly like Auburn; even that blazing light that came rushingdown out of the sky. I wondered about that at the time--what kind of amissile would produce an effect like that. Now I know. We just launchedone like it."
"But that's impossible! I told you, between us we know everything thatwas happening in nuclear physics then. Nobody in the world knew how toassemble atoms of negamatter and build them into masses."
"Nobody, and nothing, on this planet built that mass of negamatter. Idoubt if it even came from this Galaxy. But we didn't know that, then.When that negamatter meteor fell, the only thing anybody could think ofwas that it had been a Soviet missile. If it had hit around Leningrad orMoscow or Kharkov, who would you have blamed it on?"
THE END.
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TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS CORRECTED
The following typographical errors in the text were corrected asdetailed here.
In the text: "Could they have built an ICBM with a thermonuclearwarhead ..." the word "termonuclear" was corrected to "thermonuclear."
In the text: "If it had hit around Leningrad or Moscow ..." the word"Lenigrad" was corrected to "Leningrad."
In the text: "... from all over South America, from South Africaand Australia ..." the word "Austrailia" was corrected to "Australia."
In the text: "Or Japan, or the Moslem States...." the word "Moselem"was corrected to "Moslem."
In the text: "... the director of the Institute, left ..." the word"Insitutue" was corrected to "Institute."
Misspelt proper names were also corrected: "Klyzneko" was corrected to"Klyzenko," and "Pitou" was corrected to "Pitov."
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