that time, the cosmic radiation was over and we weren’t getting anything but gamma.”
“What—What has Auburn to do—?” The Russian stopped short. “You think this was the same thing?” He gave it a moment’s consideration. “Lee, you’re crazy! There wasn’t an atom of artificial negamatter in the world in 1969. Nobody had made any before us. We gave each other some scientific surprises, then, but nobody surprised both of us. You and I, between us, knew everything that was going on in nuclear physics in the world. And you know as well as I do—”
A voice came out of the public-address speaker. “Some of the radio equipment around the target area, that wasn’t knocked out by blast, is beginning to function again. There is an increasingly heavy gamma radiation, but no more cosmic rays. They were all prompt radiation from the annihilation; the gamma is secondary effect. Wait a moment; Captain Urquiola, of the Air Force, says that the first drone plane is about to take off.”
It had been two hours after the blast that the first drones had gone over what had been Auburn, New York. He was trying to remember, as exactly as possible, what had been learned from them. Gamma radiation; a great deal of gamma. But it didn’t last long. It had been almost down to a safe level by the time the investigation had been called off, and, two months after there had been no more missiles, and no way of producing more, and no targets to send them against if they’d had them, rather—he had been back at Auburn on his hopeless quest, and there had been almost no trace of radiation. Nothing but a wide, shallow crater, almost two hundred feet in diameter and only fifteen at its deepest, already full of water, and a circle of flattened and scattered rubble for a mile and a half all around it. He was willing to bet anything that that was what they’d find where the chunk of nega-iron had landed, fifty miles away on the pampas.
Well, the first drone ought to be over the target area before long, and at least one of the balloons that had been sent up was reporting its course by radio. The radios in the others were silent, and the recording counters had probably jammed in all of them. There’d be something of interest when the first drone came back. He dragged his mind back to the present, and went to work with Alexis Pitov.
They were at it all night, checking, evaluating, making sure that the masses of data that were coming in were being promptly processed for programming the computers. At each of the increasingly frequent coffee-breaks, he noticed Pitov looking curiously. He said nothing, however, until, long after dawn, they stood outside the bunker, waiting for the jeep that would take them back to their bungalow and watching the line of trucks—Argentine army engineers, locally hired laborers, load after load of prefab-huts and equipment—going down toward the target-area, where they would be working for the next week.
“Lee, were you serious?” Pitov asked. “I mean, about this being like the one at Auburn?”
“It was exactly like Auburn; even that blazing light that came rushing down out of the sky. I wondered about that at the time—what kind of a missile would produce an effect like that. Now I know. We just launched one like it.”
“But that’s impossible! I told you, between us we know everything that was happening in nuclear physics then. Nobody in the world knew how to assemble atoms of negamatter and build them into masses.”
“Nobody, and nothing, on this planet built that mass of negamatter. I doubt if it even came from this Galaxy. But we didn’t know that, then. When that negamatter meteor fell, the only thing anybody could think of was that it had been a Soviet missile. If it had hit around Leningrad or Moscow or Kharkov, who would you have blamed it on?”
Oomphel in the Sky
Miles Gilbert watched the landscape slide away below him, its quilt of rounded treetops mottled red and orange in the double sunlight and, in shaded places, with the natural yellow of the vegetation of Kwannon. The aircar began a slow swing to the left, and Gettler Alpha came into view, a monstrous smear of red incandescence with an optical diameter of two feet at arm’s length, slightly flattened on the bottom by the western horizon. In another couple of hours it would be completely set, but by that time Beta, the planet’s G-class primary, would be at its midafternoon hottest. He glanced at his watch. It was 1005, but that was Galactic Standard Time, and had no relevance to anything that was happening in the local sky. It did mean, though, that it was five minutes short of two hours to ’cast-time.
He snapped on the communication screen in front of him, and Harry Walsh, the news editor, looked out of it at him from the office in Bluelake, halfway across the continent. He wanted to know how things were going.
“Just about finished. I’m going to look in at a couple more native villages, and then I’m going to Sanders’ plantation to see Gonzales. I hope I’ll have a personal statement from him, and the final situation-progress map, in time for the ’cast. I take it Maith’s still agreeable to releasing the story at twelve-hundred?”
“Sure; he was always agreeable. The Army wants publicity; it was Government House that wanted to sit on it, and they’ve given that up now. The story’s all over the place here, native city and all.”
“What’s the situation in town, now?”
“Oh, it’s still going on. Some disorders, mostly just unrest. Lot of street meetings that could have turned into frenzies if the police hadn’t broken them up in time. A couple of shootings, some sleep-gassing, and a lot of arrests. Nothing to worry about—at least, not immediately.”
That was about what he thought. “Maybe it’s not bad to have
