It was delivered in an almost formal tone, as if now she were rephrasing from her own language. * * * * * The trip back was simpler than the first trip, since the ferry now carried no cargo and only half as much fuel. It responded more readily. Peal was silent until they were well away from the _Sulky_. Then he shook his head as if coming out of a brown study. "Jerry, where do they keep their bombs? We covered every single inch of that station--we went into every room and cranny. I watched to make sure she wasn't just doubling back. She did, sometimes, but she showed us the whole thing, all the same. And there were no bombs or missiles big enough to dump warheads on Earth. There was one place where they should have been, with what could have been outside release chutes. But it was empty, though there were scratches on the floor where missiles might have stood." Blane nodded, remembering the place they'd been led across three times. "I know, I saw it. They don't have bombs. They had them, but they're gone. And Sonya Vartanian meant us to see it, too. She didn't quit leading us across the place until she knew I'd guessed." * * * * * "Why let us know? So we could report that they've been pulling a colossal bluff at those disarmament meetings? That doesn't make sense." "No." Blane had been doing his own thinking. "Nobody would believe us--it's incredible, and they'd be sure we'd been duped neatly. They wouldn't dare believe us. And it isn't because Russia is too civilized to use bombs, either; that station was better designed for war than ours, and policies don't change that fast. My guess is that they've been gone from the station two years now." Peal considered it. "That would be when we spotted the first mass of all their ships together--probably carrying the missiles back to Earth in emergency action. Then that flight that blew up must have been set to carry new missiles up, right?" Blane nodded. It wasn't a happy idea. It would have taken some very good reason for Russia to remove her missiles during a period of rising tension and hold off for two years before further pressures forced her to resume the idea of stockpiling weapons in space. * * * * * He studied the distant _Goddard_ through his telescope as they began to draw near. "Maybe I'm wrong, Austin. But they first put warheads out in space a couple of years before we could. And maybe those warheads began to go through a rapid increase in radioactivity a couple of years before Manners noticed that ours were doing the same. If so, it must have been a pretty serious warning to make the officials disarm the station secretly." "The girl wanted us to see that the bombs were gone, and she couldn't talk about it. Then she put too much emphasis on that business of offering help if we were in danger." Peal grimaced. "It all adds up." "How much longer will we have?" Blane asked.