At seven thirty, when the sun had finally set, he sighted the lights of Red Mountain, and he cut his speed and swung in to land. There was no trouble picking out the power plant; it was a big dome-shaped building surrounded by a high wall. It was so brilliantly lit up, that it stood out like a beacon, and there were several hundred men milling about before it. He settled down on the lawn inside the walls, and the sheriff came bustling up, a little more red in the face than usual. "I've been trying to figure for the last hour what the devil I would do to stop him if he decided to come here," Berkhammer said. "He's not here then?" The sheriff shook his head. "Not a sign of him. We've gone over the place three times." Jordan settled back in relief, sitting down in the open doorway of his ship. "Good," he said wearily. "Good!" the sheriff exploded. "I don't know whether I'd rather have him show up or not. If this whole business is nothing more than the crazy imagination of some kid who ought to get tanned and a star-cop with milk behind his ears, I'm really in the soup. I've sent out an alarm and I've got the whole state jumping. There's a full mechanized battalion of state troops waiting in there." He pointed toward the power plant. "They've got artillery and tanks all around the place." Jordan jumped down out of the ship. "Let's see what you've got set up here. In the meantime, stop fretting. I'd rather see you fired than vaporized along with fifty million other people." "I guess you're right there," Berkhammer conceded, "but I don't like to have anyone make a fool out of me." * * * * * At Ballarat, an old man, Eddie Yudovich, was the watchman and general caretaker of the electrical generation plant. Actually, his job was a completely unnecessary one, since the plant ran itself. In its very center, buried in a mine of graphite were the tubes of hafnium, from whose nuclear explosions flowed a river of electricity without the need of human thought or direction. He had worked for the company for a long time and when he became crippled with arthritis, the directors gave him the job so that he might have security in his latter years. Yudovich, however, was a proud old man, and he never once acknowledged to himself or to anyone else that his work was useless. He guarded and checked the plant as though it were the storehouse of the Terrestrial Treasury. Every hour punctually, he made his rounds through the building.