“What do you think you’re doing?” She demanded coldly. “David’s asleep.”

“Why were the lights out and the doors locked?”

“Who said the lights were out?” Vicky continued to stand in the opening, as if refusing him admittance. “And why are you home so early?”

Hutchman walked straight at his wife, ignoring her startled gasp, and threw open the door of the lounge. A tanned, darkhaired man of about forty, whom Hutchman identified vaguely as the owner of the local service station, was standing in the center of the room. He was pulling his trousers up over blacksatin briefs and his shocked face, above the weight-trained torso, was — an image flashed into Hutchman’s chilled brain — that of Lee Harvey Oswald just as Ruby’s bullet hit him.

“You!” Hutchman snapped, his mind still working with unexpected cryogenic efficiency. “Get dressed and get out of here.” He watched the other man slip into his shirt, noting that even in a moment of presumed stress he did so in the classical locker-room manner, one leg slightly bent, abdominal muscles tightly contracted to present a flattering posture.

“This is unforgivable,” Vicky breathed. “How dare you spy on me, then speak to my guest like that!”

“Your guest isn’t objecting. Are you, guest?”

The heavily built man stepped into his shoes and lifted his jacket from a chair without speaking.

“This is my house, Forest,” Vicky said to him, “and you don’t have to leave. In fact, I’m asking you right now not to leave.”

“Well…” Forest looked at Hutchman, the bafflement slowly fading from his eyes to be replaced by a tentative belligerency. He flexed his shoulder muscles like a cobra spreading its hood.

“Dear me,” Hutchman said with affected weariness. He stepped backward into the hall, lifted a three-foot machete from its hooks on the wall, and returned to the lounge. “Listen to me, Forest. I’m not angry with you about what happened here earlier — you simply happened to be walking by when the fruit machine paid off — but now you’re intruding on my privacy and if you don’t go away from here I mean to kill you.”

“Don’t believe him,” Vicky laughed shakily and moved closer to Forest.

Hutchman glanced around the room, picked out a Hepplewhite chair which Vicky’s father had given to her the previous year, and split its shield-shaped back in two with the machete. Vicky gave a low scream but the act of vandalism seemed to have proved something to Forest, who headed determinedly for the front door. She followed him for a few paces, then abruptly appeared to lose interest.

“Destroying that chair wasn’t very bright,” she said disinterestedly. “It was worth money.”

Hutchman waited till the car outside had started up and moved away before he spoke. “Just tell me one thing. Was this the first night your… guest was here?”

“No, Lucas.” Vicky’s voice was incongruously tender, unmanning him. “This wasn’t the first night.”

“Then…” Now that there was no outsider present for Hutchman to play to he was, for the second time in an hour, confronted with reality. He grasped its white-hot metal. “Then I was too late.”

“Much too late.” Again the cruel tenderness.

“I wish I could make you see how wrong you’ve been, Vicky. I’ve never been unfaithful to you. I… .” Hutchman stopped speaking as his throat closed in pain. All these years, he thought. All the beautiful, flawed years thrown away. And for what?

“You started this, Lucas. At least be man enough to go through with it without crying.” Vicky lit a cigarette as she spoke, her eyes hard and triumphant behind a writhing mask of smoke.

“All right, Vicky,” he managed to say, and for a moment he could almost see the antibomb machine interposed between them. “I promise I’ll go through with it.”

“If you have something on your mind, domestic or otherwise, which is affecting your work — why don’t you tell me about it?” Arthur Boswell, head of missile research and development at Westfield’s, put on his gold-rimmed spectacles and looked closely at Hutchman. His eyes were very blue and very inquisitive behind their flakes of glass.

“There isn’t any special problem, Arthur.” Hutchman faced the older man across an expanse of rosewood desk and wondered if he should have admitted to some kind of a personal crisis if only to make the next few days in the office a little easier.

“I see.” Boswell let his gaze travel nostalgically around the big office, with its twenty-year-old photographs of missile firings on the paneled walls. “You haven’t been looking at all well, lately, Hutch.”

“Ah… no.” Hutchman too glanced around the office, wishing he could think of something useful to say, but his mind kept dwelling on the idea that missile photographs were incongruous in the atmosphere with which Boswell was trying to surround himself. They should have been brown prints of stick-and-string aircraft, dating from Asquith and Lloyd George, with fragile, organic-looking wings. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t been sleeping properly for some time. I suppose I ought to see the quack and get some pills.”

“Sleep’s important. You can’t manage for long without it,” Boswell pronounced. “Why can’t you sleep?”

“No special reason.” Back to square one, Hutchman thought. Arthur has something on his mind.

“I’m considering giving you an assistant, Hutch.”

“There’s no need for that,” Hutchman said in sudden alarm — the last thing he wanted was a stranger billeted in his office. “I mean there’s no point in it. I’ll be through the work in a couple of weeks and it would take a new man that long to brief himself properly.”

“Two weeks,” Boswell appeared to sieze on the definite statement. “We couldn’t give it much more. The board want to reach a definite decision about Jack and Jill next month.”

“Two weeks is all I need,” Hutchman assured him. He left Boswell’s office with the self-imposed deadline singing in his ears and hurried upstairs to the less sumptuous environs in which most of the R and D staff worked. Two weeks would be just about enough time in which to make the world’s nuclear powers aware of the existence of his machine provided he worked quickly and made no wrong moves. I will work quickly, Vicky, and I’ll make no mistakes. Just for you.

A task he had to get on with immediately was writing out a summary of his maths and a specification for the machine. These would have to be copied several hundred times then mailed out to a list of institutions and individuals across the world. A minor difficulty was that the mailings would have to be scheduled to allow for varying delivery times to different countries, so that all would reach their destinations at roughly the same time. And a major difficulty was that as soon as the envelopes were opened, a lot of people — powerful, ruthless people — would want Hutchman killed. The only way to forestall them, he realized, would be to maintain a high degree of secrecy. Up till now he had assumed that the secure drawer of his desk was a safe enough place to keep his original notes and schematics, but there were those in the company who considered Westfield’s security an elaborate joke. Hand all our secret plans to the Russians, the saying went, then they’ll be five years behind us.

A prey to fresh unease, Hutchman discovered he could not even remember locking the drawer. He speeded up his pace until he was almost running along the corridor, and burst into his office. Don Spain was standing at Hutchman’s desk, his gray-jowled face intent as he riffled through the papers in the secure drawer.

“Ho there, Hutch,” he said hoarsely, grinning. “Where do you keep your pencil sharpener?”

“Not in there,” Hutchman snapped, and almost as an afterthought added, “You prying little bastard.”