"Sit down, Alan." He did so automatically, and she perched tailor-fashion on the edge of the couch beside him. "What's the matter?" "I wish I knew." "Just the blues? You been skipping meals? That always makes you ethereal and moody. I'd as soon have Unquote with a toothache around the place as you after you've missed your lunch." "No, not the blues. Big trouble, sweetheart, that's been exploding right and left with no rhyme to it. I've thought so much about it in the last few hours that I doubt if I can even talk about it now." * * * * * Then, of course, he told her everything: beginning with the welder's accident and eerie lack of pain, then the shot from the bushes, Brave's indefinite fears climaxing at the telecast, Don Mariner's discovery of the undreamt-of potentials of the disks, the crack-up ending the almost-furtive test flight, and the pilot who lived when he should have been butchered, Alan brought it all out; and as he listened to his own words a dreadful idea was born and grew and expanded throughout his intellect until suddenly he knew that here was his answer, that no other could be rationally accepted. He sat silently for minutes, while Win watched him, and gradually the color swept out of his face and he began to shiver. She put the glass into his hand. He drained off the last of the drink, and she clicked open a deep drawer of the cocktail table and gave him another, freshly mixed at a touch of her finger on the emerald stud of the drawer. "What is it, Alan? You've seen something in it, some connection between these events. What is it?" He took a shuddering breath through open lips and said, "Yes, I know. I know what we have to fight." "Fight? You mean there are enemies? You can deduce that from--" "My God, yes, there are enemies." He turned, to fix her with a glare like a lunatic's. "Listen, Win. We all have the desire to go out to the other planets, and to the stars beyond our system. We've built a score of rocket projects all over the continent because of that desire. It's no secret, everyone has it. Right?" "Sure, darling. Even I want to see--well, Mars, anyway." "But here are these disks, too good, too damned good by far, possibly capable of doing just that; and the government and most of us have thought they were only for earth travel. Why? Who would want to build ships for interplanetary, or even for all I know interstellar-space flight, and keep it hidden from the rest of mankind?" "Russia?" she suggested humbly. "Oh, nuts. You might as well say Switzerland. No, it's here at home, on Project Star, and it's a handful or more than a handful of our own top men. "Now the other angle: there are men here who apparently can't be hurt by ordinary means, who don't feel pain, who can resist the force of such a weapon as a thousand-pound cutlass-edged juggernaut, and who only stare quietly when their hands are melted off like butter in a flame." "Yes?"