And on Earth an official statement went out from high authority. It announced that a hurriedly completed American ship was on the way to M-387 to investigate the signals from space. It announced that measures long in preparation were now in use, and that an invincible fleet of spacecraft would be completed in months, whereas they had not been hoped for for another generation. An unexpected breakthrough had made it possible to advance the science of space travel by many decades, and a fleet to explore all the planets as well as M-387 was already under construction. It was almost true that they were. The blueprints of Burke's ship had been flown to Washington from the plant, and an enormous number of replicas of the egg-shaped vessel were ordered to be begun immediately, even before the theory of the drive was understood. There was one minor hitch. A legal-minded official protested that Congressional appropriations had been for rocket-driven spaceships only, and the money appropriated could not be used for other than rockets. An executive order settled the matter. Then theorists began to object to the principle of the drive. It contradicted well-established scientific beliefs. It could not work. It did, but there was violent opposition to the fact. Publicly, of course, the shock of such an about-face by the national government was extreme. But newspapers flashed new headlines. "U.S. SHIP SPEEDING TO QUERY ALIENS!" Lesser heads announced, "_Critical Velocity Exceeded! Russian Probe Already Passed!_" The last was not quite true. The Russian manned probe had started out ten days before. Burke hadn't overtaken it yet. Broadcasters issued special bulletins, and two networks canceled top evening programs to schedule interviews with prominent scientists who'd had nothing whatever to do with what Burke had managed to achieve. In Europe, obviously, the political effect was stupendous. Russia was reduced to impassioned claims that the ship had been built from Russian plans, using Russian discoveries, which had been stolen by imperialistic secret agents. And the heads of the Russian spy system were disgraced for not having, in fact, stolen the plans and discoveries from the Americans. All other operatives received threats of what would happen to them if they didn't repair that omission. These threats so scared half a dozen operatives that they defected and told all they knew, thereby wrecking the Russian spy system for the time being. Essentially, however, the recovery of confidence in America was as extravagant as the previous unhappy desire to hear no more about space. Burke, Holmes, Keller, Sandy and Pam became national heroes and heroines within eighteen hours after guided missiles had failed to shoot them down. The only criticism came from a highly conservative clergyman who hoped that other young girls would not imitate Sandy's and Pam's disregard of convention and maintained that a married woman should have gone along to chaperon them.