Myra got breakfast. She dropped the skillet while transferring the eggs to a platter but she got her foot out of the way so no harm was done. After breakfast the men went back outside. Jim moved automatically toward a chair. Then he stopped and frowned. He straightened deliberately. He turned and looked at his brother. He said, "Hugh. You're a man that knows. What's wrong? What did those bombs do to us? Tell me. I've got to know." Hugh was silent for a time. Then he said, "Feel up to a walk?" "Certainly. Why not?" They went to the edge of town and out into a pasture and stopped finally by a brook where the water flowed sluggishly. After a while, Hugh said, "I'm not supposed to tell anybody anything, but somehow it doesn't seem decent--keeping the truth from your own brother. And what difference does it make--really?" "What's happened, Hugh." "There weren't any bombs." "No bombs." "It happened this way. Long before this Earth was formed, a million light years out in space, a white dwarf died violently." "You're talking in riddles." Hugh looked up into the blue sky. "A dwarf star, Jim. So incredibly heavy, it would be hard for you to conceive of its weight. This star blew up--broke into five pieces and the five pieces followed each other through space. This world was formed in the meantime--maybe even this galaxy--we don't know. So the five pieces of heavy star had a rendezvous with a world unborn. The world was born and grew old and then the rendezvous was kept. Right on schedule. On some schedule so huge and ponderous we can't even begin to understand it." "The five bombs." "They hit the earth in a line and drove deep into the ground. But that was only the beginning. It all has to do with magnetism--the way they kept right on burrowing toward the center of our earth--causing the earthquakes--causing apples to fall from trees." Hugh turned to glance at Jim. "Did you know you weigh around six hundred pounds now?" "I haven't weighed myself lately." "We checked and found out what the stuff was. We'd never seen anything like it before. That star was a real heavyweight. All the pieces are drawing together toward the center of earth. But they'll never get there." "They won't." "We're doomed, Jim. Earth is doomed. That's the why of this censorship. We didn't want panics--mass suicide--a world gone mad." "How's it going to come?" "If allowed to run its course, the world would come to a complete standstill. Nothing would grow. People would move slower and slower until they finally fell in their tracks and could not get up. Eternal night on one side of a dead planet--eternal day on the other." "But it's not going to happen?" Hugh's mind went off on another track. "You know, Jim--I've never been a religious man. In fact I've only had one concept of God. I believe that God--above all, is a gentleman." Jim said nothing and after a moment, Hugh went on. "Do you know what they do when they execute a man by firing squad?"