"Then why don't you call me by my name, instead of 'Sweetheart'?" "That's because I like you, Sweetheart." She was looking out the rear window. "Now just step on the gas, because we've got company." The car that had been parked near the sentry hut was whipping into view around the curve. It was lighter than his, but it was fast, too. He stepped on it. * * * * * Now the road had become narrow and twisting. The grade was steep but the surface was good. Abruptly, it entered a forest. The girl said: "Two more curves. Then you'll see a field and a barn. Off the road and into the barn, fast." He took the curves with rubber screaming and almost without braking sent the car bumping across the field and into the barn. It was bigger than it had seemed from the outside. As he brought the car to a lurching halt the barn door closed. Where he had expected to see stalls and milking machines and hay he saw an expanse of metal floor and monstrous machinery. The barn door which had been a rickety wooden slab from the outside was a gleaming sheet of metal from the inside. It glided silently shut and left no joint or seam to show where there had been an opening. "Out," said Naomi. As they left the car, a flexible metal arm snaked from one of the smooth walls, attached itself to the front bumper of the vehicle, and whisked it into a cubicle which opened to receive it and closed behind it. A power-driven wheelchair sped up to them. Sitting in it was a fat man of middle age, with pendulous jowls and a totally bald head. His expression was a sardonic scowl. "You have the plans?" he asked the girl. "Sweetheart here has them." "I don't know what you're talking about," the young man said. "He knows, all right," the girl said. "He pretends to be innocent, but that is merely his training. He has them under a sticking plaster on the small of his back." "Remove your coat and shirt," commanded the man in the wheelchair. At that moment the floor shuddered under their feet, a gong began to clang insistently, and the giant machinery, which had been silent, throbbed into life. The man in the wheelchair whirled and was off, shouting commands to men who materialized high on the walls in cylindrical turrets which the visitor could only think of as battle stations. "What _is_ this place?" he asked. He got no answer. Instead the girl grabbed his arm and pulled him off to the edge of the gigantic metal room. An opening appeared in the wall and she pushed him through it into a room beyond. The entranceway snapped shut behind them and when he looked he could see no door. The room also was windowless. Naomi went to a metal table and as she looked down into its surface it became a screen. Mirrored in it was the mountainous countryside they had driven through to get to the barn--or what had seemed to be a barn from the outside. He looked over her shoulder.