"But I am not a medical man --"

"I know that, but you are the nearest thing we've got to one."

"Very well, sir."

Dr. Brooks examined Thomas' pupils, tried his knee jerks, and checked his pulse and respiration. "I should say that he was perfectly normal, though exhausted and laboring under excitement. Naturally, this is not a positive diagnosis. If I had more time --"

"It will do for now. Thomas, I trust you won't hold it against me if we leave you locked up until we have examined your Asiatic pal."

"Certainly not, Major," Thomas told him with a wry grin, "since you're going to, anyhow."

Frank Mitsui's flesh quivered and sweat dripped from his face when Brooks stuck the hypodermic into him, but he did not draw away. Presently he relaxed under the influence of the drug that releases inhibitions, and strips from the speech centers the protection of cortical censorship. His face became peaceful.

But it was not peaceful a few minutes later when they began to question him, nor was there peace in any of their faces. This was truth, too raw and too brutal for any man to stand. Deep lines carved themselves from nose to jaw in Ardmore's face as he listened to the little man's pitiful story. No matter what line they started him on, he always came back to the scene of his dead children, his broken household. Finally Ardmore put a stop to it.

"Give him the antidote, doe. I can't stand any more of this. I've found out all I need to know."

Ardmore shook hands with him solemnly after he had returned to full awareness. "We are glad to have you with us, Mr. Mitsui. And we'll put you to some work that will give you a chance to get some of your own back. Right now I want Dr. Brooks to give you a soporific that will let you get about sixteen hours' sleep; then we can think about swearing you in and what kind of work you can be most useful doing."

"I don't need any sleep, Mister ... Major."

"Just the same, you are going to get some. And so is Thomas, as soon as he has reported. In fact --" He broke off and studied the apparently impassive face. "In fact, I want you to take a sleeping pill every night. Those are orders. You'll draw them from me and take them in my presence every night before you go to bed." There are certain bonus advantages to military absolutism. Ardmore could not tolerate the idea of the little yellow man lying awake and staring at the ceiling.

Brooks and Graham would quite plainly have liked to stay and hear Thomas' report, but Ardmore refused to notice the evident fact and dismissed them. He wished first to evaluate the data himself.

"Well, Lieutenant, I'm damn glad you're back."

"I'm glad to be back. Did you say 'lieutenant'? I assume that my rank reverts."

"Why should it? As a matter of fact, I am trying to figure out a plausible reason for commissioning Graham and Scheer. It would simplify things around here to eliminate social differences. But that is a side issue. Let's hear what you've done. I suppose you've come back with all our problems solved and tied up with string?"

"Not likely." Thomas grinned and relaxed.

"I didn't expect it. But seriously, between ourselves, I've got to pull something out of the hat, and it's got to be good. The scientific staff is beginning to crowd me, particularly Colonel Calhoun. There's no damn sense in their making miracles in the laboratory unless I can dope out some way to apply those miracles in strategy and tactics."

"Have they really gone so far?"

"You'd be surprised. They've taken that so-called 'Ledbetter effect' and shaken it the way a terrier shakes a rat. They can do anything with it but peel the potatoes and put out the cat."

"Really?"

"Really. "

"What sort of things can they do?"

"Well --" Ardmore took a deep breath. "Honestly, I don't know where to begin. Wilkie has tried to keep me posted with simplified explanations, but, between ourselves, I didn't understand more than every other word. One way of putting it is to say that they've discovered atomic control -- oh, I don't mean atom-splitting, or artificial radioactivity. Look -- we speak of space, and time, and matter, don't we?"

"Yes. There's Einstein's space-time concept, of course. "

"Of course. Space-time is standard stuff in high school these days. But these men really mean it. They really mean that space and time and mass and energy and radiation and gravity are all simply different ways of thinking about the same thing. And if you once catch on to how just one of them works, you have the key to all of them. According to Wilkie, physicists up to now, even after the A-bomb was developed, were just fooling around the edges of the subject; they had the beginnings of a unified field theory, but they didn't really believe it themselves; they usually acted as if these were all as different as the names for them.

"Apparently Ledbetter hit on the real meaning of radiation, and that has given Calhoun and Wilkie the key to everything else in physics. Is that clear?" he added with a grin.

"Not very," Thomas admitted. "Can you give me some idea of what they can do with it?"

"Well, to begin with, the original Ledbetter effect, the thing that killed most of the personnel here, Wilkie calls an accidental side issue. Brooks says that the basic radiation affected the colloidal dispersal of living tissue; those that were killed were coagulated by it. It might just as well have been set to release surface tension -- in fact, they did that the other day, exploded a half of beefsteak like so much dynamite."

"Huh?"

"Don't ask me how; I'm just repeating the explanation given me. But the point is, they seem to have found out what makes matter tick. They can explode it -- sometimes -- and use it for a source of power. They can transmute it into any element they want. They seem to be confident that they know what to do to find out how gravity works, so that they will be able to handle gravity the way we now handle electricity. "

"I thought gravity was not considered a force in the modern concepts."

"So it isn't but, then, 'force' isn't force, either, in unified field theory. Hell's bells, you've got me bogged down in

language difficulties. Wilkie says that mathematics is the only available language for these ideas."

"Well, I guess I'll just have to get along without understanding it. But, frankly, I don't see how they managed to come so far so fast. That changes just about everything we thought we knew. Honestly, how is it that it took a hundred fifty years to go from Newton to Edison, yet these boys can knock out results like that in a few weeks?"

"I don't know myself. The same point occurred to me, and I asked Calhoun about it. He informed me in that schoolmaster way of his that it was because those pioneers did not have the tensor calculus, vector analysis, and matrix algebra."

"Well, I wouldn't know," observed Thomas. "They don't teach that stuff in law school."

"Nor me," admitted Ardmore. "I tried looking over some of their work sheets. I can do simple algebra, and I've had some calculus, though I haven't used it for years, but I couldn't make sense out of this stuff. It looked like Sanskrit; most of the signs were different, and even the old ones didn't seem to mean the same things. Look -- I thought that a times b always equaled b times a."

"Doesn't it?"

"Not when these boys get through kicking it around. But we are getting way off the subject. Bring me up to date."

"Yes, sir." Jeff Thomas talked steadily for a long time, trying very hard to paint a detailed picture of everything he had seen and heard and felt. Ardmore did not interrupt him except with questions intended to clarify points. There was a short silence when he had concluded. Finally Ardmore said: