Bacon and eggs certainly taste good after a long night, I was thinking as I champed into the last piece of toast. I got it down, drained my glass of powdered milk and held up my coffee cup to Pat. She looked tired, a little pale, from lack of sunlight, perhaps, and very thoughtful as she filled it. I touched her hand as the cup passed back to me and she smiled tenderly. If Hallam saw it, he made no comment. I felt sorry for him at times like that. He was, in spite of his friendliness, a lonely man. I remembered now that his fiancee, an Army nurse, had been killed at Cassino in the unit he commanded. Since that time he had turned to his work for consolation and apparently had never found anyone he really cared for. "Sir," I said--somehow I never could bring myself to use his first name; habit is strong and he looked too much like a soldier even now, a soldier who commanded respect. "Sir, what did you mean last night, as that ferret was aborting, when you said they wouldn't try it, and yet what better way?" "I suppose to explain that, I'd better give you my reasoning in this whole business." He looked at his watch. "We've an hour before the next stage of our experiments ... not enough to sleep. At any rate we can sleep later." Pat refilled the cups and silently I passed around a packet of Sweet Caps. He lit one and started. "As you both remember, after Stalin died there was a period of uncertainty and then, when Malenkov gave way to the Krushchev-Bulganin team, the so-called Geneva conference-at-the-summit initiated what has been called the peace offensive by the Russians. The Hungarian revolt and the trouble in East Germany and Poland put a crimp in their pious front. That front was still further dinted by their obvious interference in the Middle East. But aside from that, the uneasy truce has continued, mainly, I suppose, because of the fear of an H-bomb war. Except for Tibet, Red China too has been fairly quiet, mostly because she still doesn't have the industrial potential to fight a major war; and the Soviets have procrastinated in helping her because they, too, fear the dreadful potential of such a population, if armed." "The Geophysical Year saw both Russian and American satellites circling the world and the race for the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, with H-bomb warhead, seems to have ended in a stalemate. The Russians, the Yanks, and now the British Commonwealth, possess long-range rockets of great accuracy. The next logical step, since both atomic and ballistic wars promise mutual suicide, is into space. There, the two main opponents could spy on each other and neither the Iron Curtain nor the security regulations of the USA would hide secret preparations for a knockout punch. Also, there possibly are immense stores of valuable minerals open to the owners of the moon and planets. But space travel takes time and money ... and brains. Manned satellites are on the way, but are not yet established facts."