at least one of the balloons that had been sent up was reporting its
course by radio. The radios in the others were silent, and the recording
counters had probably jammed in all of them. There'd be something of
interest when the first drone came back. He dragged his mind back to the
present, and went to work with Alexis Pitov.

They were at it all night, checking, evaluating, making sure that the
masses of data that were coming in were being promptly processed for
programming the computers. At each of the increasingly frequent
coffee-breaks, he noticed Pitov looking curiously. He said nothing,
however, until, long after dawn, they stood outside the bunker, waiting
for the jeep that would take them back to their bungalow and watching
the line of trucks--Argentine army engineers, locally hired laborers,
load after load of prefab-huts and equipment--going down toward the
target-area, where they would be working for the next week.

"Lee, were you serious?" Pitov asked. "I mean, about this being like the
one at Auburn?"

"It was exactly like Auburn; even that blazing light that came rushing
down out of the sky. I wondered about that at the time--what kind of a
missile would produce an effect like that. Now I know. We just launched
one like it."

"But that's impossible! I told you, between us we know everything that
was happening in nuclear physics then. Nobody in the world knew how to
assemble atoms of negamatter and build them into masses."

"Nobody, and nothing, on this planet built that mass of negamatter. I
doubt if it even came from this Galaxy. But we didn't know that, then.