cheap price to pay for ending the rule of the Communist Party."

"Could they have built an ICBM with a thermonuclear warhead in secret?"
he asked. "There were also fanatical nationalist groups in Europe, both
sides of the Iron Curtain, who might have thought our mutual destruction
would be worth 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