"Are you Roger Lorin?" The question came from a short, stocky, gray-haired individual. "Yes, I am," Roger replied. "I'm Jacob Darcy. I'm supposed to show you to your apartment and help you get oriented." "Good," Roger said. "You lead. We'll follow." Darcy turned and led them to a small electric monorail car which sped them through a maze of underground streets past the windows of many shops and stores. After a ten minute ride in the monorail and a fast ascent in an elevator, the three of them entered a small apartment high in one of the slablike buildings. The apartment was comfortable and compact, though not luxuriously furnished. One transparent wall of the living room looked out over the city and the arctic landscape. "I thought things would be more primitive," said Linda as she looked around her future home. "This doesn't seem like a frontier at all." "No," Darcy replied with a smile. "Arctic City is pretty well built up. Conditions are a lot better here than they are in some of the mining centers farther north." He turned to Roger. "I'll be around tomorrow morning to show you the labs. Sometime around eight or eight thirty." "I'll be ready," replied Roger. "It should be interesting to see the facilities here." "I suppose the high temperature work will be most interesting to you," said Darcy. "I read your paper on molecular linkages. We'll sure be able to use you. We're having the devil's own time with the linings for the reaction chambers in the neutron pile." "I hope I can help," said Roger. "The cooling problem should be quite a challenge without the extreme temperatures and high vacuum that we had at the moon labs." "That's right. You did work on the first neutron pile, didn't you?" Darcy said as he prepared to leave. "That makes it much better. There are too few men with practical experience in neutron pile work." It had long been known by physicists that tremendous amounts of energy could be released if matter could be collapsed to form neutrons. This step had been achieved in 2047 A. D., at the Lunar atomic laboratories. The Arctic City pile was the first attempt to apply it to industrial uses.