the minister had to wait By Roger Dee The Brass said, "Turn it on!" So Doc Maxey could but obey--which created one hell of a big mess. THE MONSTERS HAD NO EYES BUT THEY WERE BEMS FOR A' THAT. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe June-July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Doc Maxey didn't build the Di-tube as a weapon. Furthermore, he swore, he would be damned if he'd stand by and see it turned into one. Dora and I--Dora is Doc's daughter and I'm Jerry Bivins, his assistant--were helping him with the working model of the Di-tube generator in his Connecticut laboratory when he made that plain to the brass and brains of Allied Military, a delegation headed by two full generals and guarded by a hard-jawed squad of MP's. But for once the Doc was on the wrong end of a browbeating. The generals knew their ground and they shut the Doc up like a thirty-dollar shoe clerk. "Since a state of global emergency has been declared," Three-star Corbin said icily, "the military has full authority to commandeer the fruits of any independent research. Eastern and Western forces are at the ultimate in cold-war deadlock, a stalemate which must soon cripple the economy of the world unless it is broken. Your Dimension-tube offers an ideal weapon for ending it." He was right about the deadlock if not about the Di-tube. Every strategically important center in the Eastern Hemisphere had been impregnably roofed since the early 1970's with the transmuscreen, a force-shield that inerted atomic warheads to harmless isotopic lead. We Westerners had the same protection, of course, which brought on the stalemate. The catch was that neither side could afford to relax its screens for an instant, and the power required to sustain those giant force-shells was rapidly exhausting the resources of both hemispheres. * * * * * Two-star Demarest was more diplomatic than Corbin but twice as pompous. "As we understand it, Dr. Maxey, this Dimension-tunnel effect of yours will permit us to dispatch robojet warheads through an--ah, a cylindrical rift in the continuum of space to any desired part of the globe. A rift large enough would enable us to reach through the enemy's defense screens, short-cutting normal space in much the same manner as a two-dimensional ant, which was crawling upon a flat sheet of paper--" "Could reach the opposite side instantaneously by piercing the paper," Doc finished for him, fuzzing out his scrubby beard like a baited goat. "The two of you sound like sub-juvenile idiots, mouthing moronic oversimplifications lifted straight from the Sunday comic-tapes. You disgust me with the human species!"