The men in the bus talked little. Most of them tired, and some a little the worse for a night's revels, were sleeping. Two or three snored away, unmindful of the hard seats and the jolting along the road. Seated in the back, shoulder to shoulder with several others, Robin kept quiet, watching the scene through the open windows and seeing what could be seen of the terrain without making his observations too obvious. Thus far the landscape was the familiar desert of New Mexico, desolate and arid flatland with which Robin had become familiar on the trip down. On the horizon he could see the humps of mountains, the peaks that bordered the vast proving grounds. Near him, a couple of soldiers were conversing in low tones and Robin caught snatches of their conversation. At first it was mainly talk of what they had seen and done that night, their girl friends, and so on. By and by they began to talk a bit about their work. Robin strained his ears. "I was thinking of asking for a transfer back to White Sands," said one of the men slowly. "Some of that new fuel they're bringing in makes me real uneasy." "Ahh," said the other, "you're just letting that extra security talk give you nerves. Sure, it's supposed to be atomic stuff, new, maybe even untested as far as I know, but, nuts, you can't get blown up any worse than you can handling that liquid oxygen and peroxide they got at White Sands. In fact, I understand that this stuff isn't half as tricky to pour as the old stuff." "Yeah, I know. I seen some of it being poured yesterday into that new big fellow they're lining up for tomorrow. But the point is that even if it's easier to pour--none of that fizzing and spitting you get when you leak a drop or two--it's atomic. That's the thing, atomic. What would happen if a White Sands rocket blew ... it'd be a big bang, sure enough, but it wouldn't blow the whole countryside to bits. But take this new stuff ... whew ... we'd all be one Bikini if it went off all at once." The other soldier was silent a moment. "Well," he said finally, "could be. On the other hand, I heard them say that it is really not half as explosive as the old stuff. That loxygen they use in the original Vikings is really dangerous, will go off quick at any spark. But this new stuff, it won't actually go off until it's touched off after the rocket has gone up a few miles. It's actually hard to blast--and then I understand they ain't sure it'll work." The other one nodded. "Uh uh, so they say, but you notice where they moved our outfit, didn't you? They don't want to blow the main fields out of existence by accident, just in case they might be a little wrong. So they invented this Red Sands layout. I don't even like the name."