they 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 on
the lawn until it came, and after he had gotten into it, he had turned
around and looked back through the rear window, and seen Janet standing
under the front light, holding the little dog in her arms, flopping one
of its silly little paws up and down with her hand to wave goodbye to
him.

He had seen her and the dog like that every day of his life for the last
fifteen years.

"What kind of radiation are you getting?" he could hear Alexis Pitov
asking into a phone. "What? Nothing else? Oh; yes, of course. But mostly
cosmic. That shouldn't last long." He turned from the phone. "A devil's
own dose of cosmic, and some gamma. It was the cosmic radiation that put
the radios and telescreens out. That's why I insisted that the drone
planes be independent of radio control."

They always got cosmic radiation from the micro-annihilations in the
test-vault. Well, now they had an idea of what produced natural cosmic
rays. There must be quite a bit of negamatter and posimatter going into
mutual annihilation and total energy release through the Universe.

"Of course, there were no detectors set up in advance around Auburn," he
said. "We didn't really begin to find anything out for half an hour. By
that time, the cosmic radiation was over and we weren't getting anything
but gamma."

"What--What has Auburn to do--?" The Russian stopped short. "You think
this was the same thing?" He gave it a moment's consideration. "Lee,