Muriel Burnley arrived at his office at the same time as Hutchman. She was carrying the straw basket which served her in place of a handbag, arid under her arm was a roll of paper which looked like yet another travel poster for her office.

“Good morning, Mr. Hutchman,” she said watchfully, the verbal equivalent of moving pawn to king four in the day’s new battle.

“Morning, Muriel.” Without quite understanding it, Hutchman could sense the importance Muriel attached to the daily exchange of formal greetings and he had never risked not responding. He opened the door to her office, followed her into the claustrophobic cave, and picked up the small sheaf of mail from her desk. Muriel slipped out of her brown tweed coat, a movement which involved a zooming upward of her incongruously large bosom. Hutchman averted his eyes — knowing she was studying him from behind her brown lenses — and riffled through the mail.

“There’s nothing very pressing here,” he said. “Take care of it for me, will you? Use your own judgment. I’m going to be busy today and I don’t want any interruptions.”

Muriel sniffed disapprovingly and took the bunch of envelopes from him. He went into his own office, closed the connecting door carefully, and after a few moments’ thought rang Cliff Taylor, Westfield’s chief of electronic development. Taylor sounded both surprised and sleepy, but he made no complaint about being called so early in the morning.

“What can I do for you, Hutch?”

“Ah… well, I’m trying out something involving microwave radiation and I want to do the breadboard work myself. I wondered if you could give me the use of a room for a month or so.”

“I don’t know, Hutch. We’ve got all kinds of requirements being thrown at us on the Jack-and-Jill program… Is it important?”

“Very.” Hutchman traced a large D on the glassy surface of his desk. D for death. Big D used to mean Dallas and death, now it means Damascus and…

“Well, why don’t you get Mackeson to slap a few priority points on it to satisfy the computer gang?”

“It’s a semiprivate job, Cliff. Could be valuable to Westfield eventually, but I want to keep it to myself in case the whole thing fizzles out into nothing. I couldn’t go to Mackeson.”

“Can’t help you then. I mean… what sort of facilities did ou want?” Taylor was beginning to sound querulous, apparentlY sensing that Hutchman was being dishonest with him.

“Nothing much. A bench in a room I can lock up. The power supplies don’t even have to be stabilized.”

“Just a minute, Hutch. You said microwave a minute ago. How micro is micro?”

“Pretty micro.” Hutchman could feel the conversation getting out of hand — the very first person to whom he had mentioned what would have to be the world’s most secret project was becoming suspicious and asking pertinent questions. “Maybe 6 x 10^18 Hertz.”

“Christ! That kills it altogether. The zoning regulations don’t allow us to squirt that sort of radiation around unless we have all kinds of special shielding installed in the building. Sorry, Hutch.”

“It’s all right.” Hutchman put the phone down and sat staring at the frosted-glass partition and the moving gray blur which meant that Don Spain had arrived in the office earlier than usual. The project was going as he might have predicted, following the same pattern as his previous brushes with physical reality — at the lowest level — the “ten-minute” car repair jobs in which, after a full hour, he was still struggling to budge the first nut. Some people had the blessed knack of controlling their circumstances and mastering materials — others, like Hutchman, had to be content with building beautiful edifices in logic, knowing all the while they were incapable of translating them into actuality. His throat was constricting with helpless rage when the internal phone rang. He snatched it before Muriel could pick up the extension.

“Hello, Hutch.” It was Taylor again. “I’ve been thinking around your problem. Did you know that Westfield’s have the use of a lab in the Jeavons Institute over at Camburn?”

“I’d heard about it, vaguely.” Hutchman’s heart began a steady, peaceful pounding.

“It’s a fairly informal arrangement we fixed up about the time they got old man Westfield to outfit their cryogenics suite. What it boils down to is that we have the use of the lab when they aren’t pushed for space.”

“And what’s the situation now?”

“As far as I know they’ll be pretty well marking time till after Christmas. If you like I’ll ring Professor Duering and see if I can fix it for you to go over there.”

“I’d be grateful if you would, Cliff.” Hutchman, choking on a tide of warm thankfulness, had difficulty getting the words out in a normal tone. When he set the phone down he experienced a heady moment of certitude. He left his office and hurried upstairs to the purchasing department, where he spent more than two hours making notes in the catalogue library and checking on the availability of major items. In the afternoon he got confirmation from Taylor that the Jeavons Institute Laboratory was available, and drove over to look at it and collect the keys from Duering. By five o’clock, his normal quitting time, he had not done a single stroke of work on behalf of Westfield’s, but he was ready to begin drawing detailed schematics for the antibomb machine. He got Muriel to order him a pot of tea as she was leaving, and, as the building fell silent for the weekend, settled in to preparing the first drawings.

An hour later, when his concentration was at its height, he became aware of a sudden unease, a sense that something was wrong. His mind had sunk too deeply into the complex of lines and symbols to be easily distracted, but part of him began to keep guard, to spread its network of perception. There’s trouble. That gray object which Muriel has left lying against the partition on her side looks like a face. That’s what’s been making me feel jumpy. Hutchman lifted his pocket computer and was adjusting the cursor when his eyes focused on the gray object. Its cloudy features stared back impassively.

It is a face!

He started convulsively as he realized he was being observed through the frosty glass, then came the secondary realization that it had to be Don Spain. The accountant must also have been working late, but the unnatural silence which had made Hutchman unaware of his presence for an hour could only have been achieved by intent. With cool ripples of shock still coursing through his system, Hutchman casually slid his sheets of graph paper into a folder and covered it with his blotter. Spain’s face remained motionless at the partition. Hutchman took a small pencil sharpener from a drawer and threw it hard at the ghostly face. It struck the partition with a sharp crack, almost splintering the glass, and Spain disappeared from view. A few seconds later he opened the connecting door and entered from Muriel’s office.

“What’s the idea, Hutch?” he asked indignantly. “You might have smashed that glass into my face.”

“What the hell’s the idea of standing out there staring at me?”

“I didn’t know you were here. I was working late and I thought I heard a noise in your office so I came out to see what it was.”

“Thanks,” Hutchman said heavily, making no attempt to conceal his dislike of the other man. “It didn’t occur to you to open the door?”

“I didn’t want to burst in on you. After all…” Spain chuckled throatily “…you might have had a woman in here.”

“That’s the first thought that popped into your mind, is it?”

Spain shrugged and continued to grin. “It isn’t like you to work late, Hutch, and you’ve been acting a bit strange all day. Those symptoms are all part of the Batterbee syndrome. You remember Batterbee, don’t you?”

Hutchman nodded as his dread of Spain returned in full force. Batterbee had been a senior project engineer, much celebrated in Westfield lore, who had lost his job through being caught flagrante delicto with his secretary on the office carpet while supposed to be working overtime. Spain never tired of retelling the Story.