After nearly forty years, the Cold War was still going on, but now the scale had expanded from the global to the interplanetary. And now, up-and-coming China, defying the Western Powers and arrogantly ignoring her Soviet allies, had decided to get into the race late and win it if she could. And she very likely could, if she could exploit the abilities of James Ch'ien to the fullest. If Dr. Ch'ien could finish his work, travel to the stars would no longer be a wild-eyed idea; if he could finish, spatial velocities would no longer be limited to the confines of the rocket, nor even to the confines of the velocity of light. Man could go to the stars. The United States Federal Government knew--or, at least, the most responsible officers of that government knew--that Ch'ien's equations led to interstellar travel, just as Einstein's equations had led to atomic energy. Normally, the United States would never have allowed Dr. Ch'ien to attend the International Physicists Conference in Peiping. But diplomacy has its rules, too. Ch'ien had published his preliminary work--a series of highly abstruse and very controversial equations--back in '80. The paper had appeared in a journal that was circulated only in the United States and was not read by the majority of mathematical physicists. Like the work of Dr. Fred Hoyle, thirty years before, it had been laughed at by the majority of the men in the field. Unlike Hoyle's work, it had never received any publicity. Ch'ien's paper had remained buried. In '81, Ch'ien had realized the importance of his work, having carried it further. He had reported his findings to the proper authorities of the United States Government, and had convinced that particular branch of the government that his work had useful validity. But it was too late to cover up the hints that he had already published. Dr. James Ch'ien was a friendly, gregarious man. He liked to go to conventions and discuss his work with his colleagues. He was, in addition, a man who would never let anything go once he had got hold of it, unless he was convinced that he was up a blind alley. And, as far as Dr. Ch'ien was concerned, that took a devil of a lot of convincing. The United States government was, therefore, faced with a dilemma. If they let Ch'ien go to the International Conferences, there was the chance that he would be forced, in some way, to divulge secrets that were vital to the national defense of the United States. On the other hand, if they forbade him to go, the Communist governments would suspect that Ch'ien knew something important, and they would check back on his previous work and find his publications of 1980. If they did, and realized the importance of that paper, they might be able to solve the secret of the interstellar drive. The United States government had figuratively flipped a coin, and the result was that Ch'ien was allowed to come and go as he pleased, as though he were nothing more than just another government physicist.