The next day at work he absentmindedly switched on some pieces of apparatus in the wrong order and burned out a minor piece of electronics. "Damn it, Britten," Professor Glover shouted at him. "Where are your brains? Replacements are expensive up here. Time is expensive!" Britten began shaking with rage. Words rushed to his tongue which he choked down unsaid because Glover had the power of life or death over his degree and these two years must not be torn out of his life for nothing. "I'm sorry," he said, in an unsteady voice. "I guess I'm not all here today. It won't take long to repair the damage." "Never mind," Glover said. "You're coming off the project, anyway." Britten stood still. The anger roared back into his head. "I'm coming off the project? What happens to the year I've just spent?" Glover suddenly seemed more embarrassed than angry. "I'm sorry, Britten," he said, "but it's for your own good. This project has just become classified and you'd never get a publishable thesis out of it." Britten stood there looking at Glover. "This is a hell of a time to tell me," he exploded, finally. "What's become so secret about this experiment?" "Obviously, I can't tell you. I'm sorry, but we'll make it up to you somehow. We'll think of something you can do while you're here, and if necessary you can stay a little longer." _Stay longer!_ Outraged, Britten fled to his room. It was all he could do to stick out the remainder of his two years. He could not sleep that night. Little teeth of anger nibbled into his mind, while the basic question repeated itself in endless circles. Why had his experiment been pulled out from under him? Fundamental experiments in high-energy particle physics were not generally classified secret. What were they doing which had suddenly become so important? The general purpose of the space laboratory was to gather basic information about the laws of nature. The optical telescopes studied the planets as well as the farthest nebulae, unimpeded by atmospheric disturbances. The tremendous twenty-five-mile-diameter radiotelescope pinpointed short-wave radio vibrations from all parts of space. The solid-state group could study the properties of matter in a vacuum chamber of rarity unattainable anywhere on Earth. In Jim Britten's group, known variously as the Elementary Particle Division, the Lunatron group, or simply as the Lunatics, the topic of investigation was the meson. A long time ago people had considered atoms the most elementary particles. Then they found out about protons and neutrons, which were the bricks that made up the atomic nuclei. A little later, when scientists learned how to build atom smashers such as the two-billion-volt proton synchrotron, they found that they could knock mesons out of the nucleus, and they decided that the protons and neutrons were not so simple after all.