Eddie hurried to his room and put on some freshly laundered denims. Then, leaving the metal tube still wrapped in the blue jeans, he and Teena started down the street toward the college campus. Mr. Taylor was waiting for them in front of the nuclear-science building. He seemed strangely excited. Eddie wondered what his mother had said over the telephone. “Let me take it, son,” Mr. Taylor said, reaching out for the blue jeans in which the metal cylinder was wrapped. He turned to go inside. “Can we come with you, Dad?” Eddie asked quickly. “Of course, of course,” his father said over his shoulder. “Come along. If this is anything like your mother said, there’ll be a lot of questions to ask.” Eddie’s father led them through his office and on into a dressing room where they pulled on specially treated white coveralls, gloves, and hoods which fitted over their heads. Each hood had a small glass window for looking out. “Just an extra precaution,” Eddie’s father said. “Really not necessary, but we simply don’t take any chances with possible stray radiation.” They went on into the large laboratory. Eddie had been there before. The sight of the fantastically shaped apparatus used in various atomic-research tests always excited him. There were several men in the room. Each was dressed in white coverall-type protective suits similar to those he and Teena and Mr. Taylor wore. In the center of the laboratory stood a square booth with thick walls and a glass window in the front wall. Eddie knew the walls were lead-lined, and the glass was a thick, specially treated type. All experiments which were the least bit hazardous were conducted inside of that six-by-six-foot booth. The radioactive materials were handled remotely by a strange steel-fingered device operated by a man who stood safely outside of the booth. Absolutely no chances were taken in the handling of radioactive materials. Eddie’s father inspected the tube closely, as he went toward one of the many complex devices that filled the laboratory. “It’s a careful job of machining on this tube,” he said. “Surely not the work of amateurs. Seems to be a lead alloy of some kind. Probably worked out in thickness and amount of lead in the alloy so as to allow just the right amount of radioactive rays to leak through without being dangerous.” He flicked several switches and turned various knobs on the instrument under which he had placed the tube. Eddie watched dial needles quiver and lights flash, wishing he knew what they meant. “All right,” his father said, turning off the machine, “you’re exactly right. There’s radioactivity inside that tube. Plenty of it, I imagine. Yet, only enough of it is allowed to leak out to furnish a tracer. It was a regular beacon leading you right to it with your Geiger counter.” “Dad, you mean—”