Dr. Munro settled back in his chair. He pressed a button and a fuzzy-lined steel wheel rolled back on its gymbals and let them look out on the framed earth and moon. "You can keep a loose tongue on anything I tell you, Firelie, because Nepenthe is only too anxious to let Bios know that we trumped their ace again. I'd suggest Munson of International News. He's pretty good at Sunday supplements and ghostly little television fillers. But don't quote me. If you do, you'll find yourself in the middle of an Egyptian passion play, or maybe Inca--I forget which culture the death department recommended for you. Anyway, you'll be the chief victim." He paused, leaned forward to pat her hand which lay vibrant on one of the arms of her chair and resumed, after she nodded softly in complete understanding. He pointed to the watch. "Condemeign never thought we'd examine his wristwatch of course. Very probably he knew very little about our precautions. After all, the only two other Bios agents we caught never got back. X-rays taken in the tender that brought him to Nepenthe showed an intricate mechanism concealed in the stem head. It warranted investigation, because that was all he had on him that could cut ice. Nothing concealed in his clothes or in various bodily orifices--you'll pardon my frankness, of course." "No offense," she said. "What's dangerous about a watch stem?" "Bios couldn't bring an atom bomb aboard in any case. They couldn't bring it inside, so they decided to work on an outside job." "Second-story stuff?" Dr. Munro watched the rim of the moon follow its mistress down the solid curve of the window well. His eyes were still frightened, still shaken by the forgotten memory of utter annihilation. "In the little watch stem was a most ingenious device, a device for polarizing two pieces of atom-bomb explosive that had been fired from diametrically opposite directions at Nepenthe. Their velocity, of course was extreme, more than sufficient to enable them to reach the proximity point of critical mass once their courses were brought into alignment." Dr. Munro let a heavy glass ash tray drop on Condemeign's watch. The stem wheel with its axle fell out and rolled, flattened and broken on the desk top. He swept the debris together and tossed it into a disposal chute. "That was supposed to correlate the courses of the two oncoming, opposing containers, each of which was able to correct its direction when it received the proper signal from the watch stem." The Doctor sighed. "Thank heaven, neither of them did. Condemeign would have had to work it from outside Nepenthe--our power plants tended to blank out the radio signal--and he couldn't, of course." "You mean those two components were supposed to reach critical mass just over Nepenthe?" The Doctor whistled softly. "I hardly think it would have blown us entirely to flinders, but undoubtedly we would have gone out of business." * * * * *