But winning agreement to his great plan from the individualistic and anarchic SPR members had proved almost more difficult than putting through the UN and Antarctic projects. Jacques Swanson, the man responsible, had died shortly after the first ground--or rather ice--was broken south of Ross Sea. And Park Hamilton was his successor. He had never allowed himself to believe that the job was a sinecure. But he was firmly convinced that if he had been aware of the endless problems to which it would give rise he would have shot himself before considering it. Which, as his personal assistant, Miss Alderman, invariably reminded him, was so much blather. “You thrive on it,” she told him when this mood was upon him. “You look five years younger.” “That,” was his usual reply, “is because, in a Freudian sense, I’m trying to work my way back to the womb. But one of these days you’ll come in here and find me quite literally curled up in a foetal position. Then what will you do?” “Buy you a lollipop,” had been her most recent retort. All in all, a thankless business--and, opening the shocking pink envelope, Hamilton had a definite hunch that the day ahead was going to be even more thankless than usual. His foreboding was based on a number of things. Each of them was small in itself, but in toto, they shaped up to a pattern he disliked. First, for several days, everything connected with SPR had been running far too smoothly. No member scientist had come up with a demand for a half billion dollars to build a machine that would take him under the Earth’s crust. Moreover, no greedy power had been plotting in the UN Assembly to subvert to its own use the discovery of one of its nationals, solely to avoid paying SPR patent royalties. And no major industrial cartel had been stirring up trouble, charging scientist-slavery, from the same motives. What was even more suspicious and disturbing, the reliable Miss Alderman had not yet arrived at her office--and had not phoned in an explanation. Shirley, the Eurasian receptionist, had given him this information quite casually on the way in. And on top of that, Hamilton had walked under a ladder coming off the high-level ramp, where some rim repairmen had been fixing a warped edge on the helicoptor roof. This last occurrence was the most annoying, because Hamilton _knew_ it was foolishness and superstition. Yet he could not help feeling as he did. Now--the shocking pink envelope. Its color alone indicated two things. One, that it was an emergency message from Antarctica too vital to be entrusted to the usual coding channels. And two, that it must have come in during the past half hour--since he had left his apartment uptown. Otherwise it would have been relayed to him there. He was sure it could only mean trouble.