Only the United States had been left alone--and that, I think, only because nobody dared to operate on a wounded tiger. In the temper of the nation after the Short War, the Company would have survived less than a minute if it had proposed severing any of the fifty-one states.... The museum was interesting enough, for anyone with a taste for horrors. It showed the changes in Neapolitan life over the past century or so. There was a reconstruction of a typical Neapolitan home of the early Nineteen-forties: a squalid hovel, packed ten persons to the room, with an American G.I., precursor of the Company expediters, spraying DDT into the bedding. There was, by comparison, a typical Class-B Blue Heaven modern allotment--with a certain amount of poetic license; few Class-B homes really had polyscent showers and auto-cooks. * * * * * It was the section on warfare, however, that was most impressive. It was in the far back of the building, in a large chamber anchored to bedrock. It held a frightening display of weapons, from a Tiger Tank to a gas-gun. Bulking over everything else in the room, even the tank, was the thirty-foot height of a Hell-bomb in a four-story display. I looked at it a second time, vaguely disturbed by something I hadn't quite placed--an indigo gleam to the metal of the warhead, with a hint of evil under its lacquered sheen.... It was cobalt. I bent to read the legend: _This is the casing of the actual cobalt bomb that would have been used on Washington if the Short War had lasted one more day. It is calculated that, loaded with a Mark XII hydrogen-lithium bomb, sufficient radioactive Cobalt-60 would have been transmuted to end all life on Earth within thirty days._ I looked at it again, shuddering. Oh, it was safe enough now. Until the hydrogen reaction could turn the ordinary cobalt sheathing into the deadly isotope-60, it was just such stuff as was used to alloy magnets and make cobalt glass. It was even more valuable as a museum piece than as the highly purified metal. Score one for the Company. They'd put a stop to that danger. Nobody would have a chance to arm it and send it off now. No small war would find it more useful than the bomb it would need--and no principality would risk the Company's wrath in using it. And while the conspiracy might have planes and helicopters, the fissionable material was too rigidly under Company control for them to have a chance. The Super Hell-bomb would never go off. And that was something that might mean more to the Company's credit than anything else. Maybe it was possible that in this controversy _both_ sides were right. And, of course, there was the obvious corollary.