He had another of the books under his arm. He held it out to von Schlichten, and von Schlichten suddenly felt sicker than he had ever felt since, at the age of fourteen, he had gotten drunk for the first time. He had seen men crack up under intolerable strain before, but this was the first time he had seen a whole roomful of men blow their tops in the same manner. The book was a novel--a jumbo-size historical novel, of some seven or eight hundred pages. Its dust-jacket bore a slightly-more-than-bust-length picture of a young lady with crimson hair and green eyes and jade earrings and a plunging--not to say power-diving--neckline that left her affiliation with the class of Mammalia in no doubt whatever. In the background, a mushroom-topped smoke-column rose, and away from it something intended to be a four-motor propeller-driven bomber of the First Century was racing madly. The title, he saw, was _Dire Dawn_, and the author was one Hildegarde Hernandez. "Well, it has a picture of an A-bomb explosion an it," he agreed. "It has more than that; it has the whole business. Case specifications, tampers, charge design, detonating device, everything. Why, end-papers even have diagrams: copies of the original Nagasaki-bomb drawing. Look." Von Schlichten looked. He had no more than the average intelligent layman's knowledge of nuclear physics--enough to recharge or repair a conversion-unit--but the drawings looked authentic enough. They seemed to be copies of ancient blueprints, lettered in First Century English, with Lingua Terra translations added, and marked TOP SECRET and U. S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS and MANHATTAN ENGINEERING DISTRICT. "And look at this!" Pickering opened at a marked page and showed it to him. "And this!" He opened where another slip of paper had been inserted. "Everything we want to know, practically." "I don't get this." He wasn't sick, any more; just bewildered. "I read some reviews of this thing. All the reviewers panned hell out of it--'World War II Through a Bedroom Keyhole'; 'Henty in Black Lace Panties'--that sort of thing." "Yeh, yeh, sure," Pickering agreed. "But this Hernandez has illusions of being a great serious historical novelist, see. She won't try to write a book till she's put in years of research--actually, about six months' research by a herd of librarians and college-juniors and other such literary coolies--and she boasts that she never yet has been caught in an error of historical background detail.