April grinned. "I wondered when you were going to wake up to that fact. Well, at least the F.B.I. should be in a position by now. Drat this radio silence."

"How else can we get close? They've no phone down there in the nut hatch. Must be well linked with radio—maybe radar too." Mark glanced at his watch. "Better start preparing for the Stutter Beam relay, That was cool thinking on your part." He chuckled. "Space Research didn't like it one little bit when they learned you knew all about their precious Stutter Beam. By the way—how did you know?"

She made no reply until they had taken out the collapsible equipment from their shoulder packs and begun to open it up in the shade of a rock overhang.

"People call it stutter because it does—in laser light beams. But it's the invention of a man named Gabriel Stuttar—who, by merest chance, is my godfather. He's an old sweetie. It was he who encouraged me to keep on with my career." She gazed at Mark as she squatted back on her haunches. "We hear so much about our brilliant young men—and we have them, sure we do. It'd be a poor old world without them. But we have the others, too."

"What others?"

"Gabby Stuttar, for one. When he was a young man—one of the brilliant young men, I suppose he'd be called—his ideas of using laser light and a translation receiver were laughed at. Now it's top secret—one of the marvels of the age—yuck! yuck! He began it thirty years ago—now it's so secret he doesn't even rate his picture in the papers."

"Money?" said Mark.

She shrugged. "All he wants—now he doesn't really need it. Pride, he's got. Oh yes, human vanity too. One good headline, one TV interview, one award as the scientist of the year—maybe a Nobel. Won't get 'em though. Top secret—poor old duck!" She patted the small, camera-like object fixed on its swivel-topped tripod. "Thirty years, and here's us—taking for granted it'll work."

"Well, we know it will, old girl. The space boffins have proved it down to the nth. Can't be tapped, bugged or otherwise tampered with."

"Yes, but don't you see? Oh! Skip it! The sun must be softening me." She grinned. "And there's Carl Karadin too. A bit ironic, don't you think? Right now we're gearing up to smash him. And we'll do it because we have to. Twenty years ago he was branded a nutcase. A world currency was his bug and it bit him deep, deep. So deep that he worked for twenty years to perfect a way of destroying all paper currency and replacing it with a world currency. Yet even now, the finance wizards of the world are trying to work out ways of doing that very thing—a transfer to a world currency."

Mark nodded. "Crazy—just crazy! Ours not to reason why—eh, old girl?" He checked his watch again. "Nearing zero."

They donned glasses, oval-shaped, with contoured side pieces an extension of the three-colored lenses. Vertical stripes of purple, orange and green with an opaque sheen on the convex surfaces. The timing and translation controls on the receiver were set to prearranged figures and the lenses lined on a compass bearing.

Each took a cylinder from a padded pouch in their assault belt, about the size of a two-cell hand torch but larger at its base and sloping to a tiny aperture. A thumb-press, a red safety switch and a recessed gun site were the only breaks in its shiny black surface.

They checked watches again. Mark began to count down from ten to zero. "... five, four, three, two, one!"

At that second there appeared in the sky over forty miles away a series of stuttering flashes, as if sunlight was being reflected off the windshields of fast-moving cars. But through the three-colored lenses, each flash could be seen as a different shape. Some shapes repeated themselves more often than others. The relay moved at fantastic speed—so fast that whole words appeared as if some celestial type writer was impressing keys on to the hazy blue paper of the sky.

April and Mark vied with each other in their attempts to read the messages, but the phonetic alphabet used by the Laser Beam Sender had not yet been included in their curriculum and they only managed to decipher a few words in every sentence.

When the relay ceased, they both sent two long and two short flashes into the sky from their own hand beams. It took about five seconds for these flashes to reach the relay area, where they exploded into phonetic letters spelling "okay".

As they removed their glasses, Mark said:

"The range test was impressive. I'm going to have a test of my own."

"Careful," April warned.

"They won't be able to see anything from way down there."

"I didn't mean that, you oaf!"

He smiled at her. "I'll remember your concern for me—in the right place." He moved the red switch, lifted the recessed gun site on the torch body, took aim at a smallish rock some hundred yards away and pressed the button.

The rock exploded with a dull crack. Pulverized stone spurted up in a fan-shaped arc. When it had settled, only a faint depression remained where the rock had been.

Mark moved the safety-catch to "off". They looked at each other steadily, silently. April shivered slightly, then stooped over the laser beam receivers. She opened the slide panels and drew out the purple-orange-green striped film. Mark did the same.

"We could have saved one," said Mark. "But orders is orders. We might have been separated at the time."

On the films were the messages, translated into ordinary words. These read:

"Move in dusk. All forces position 1800 hours. Target area sealed. Avoid or destroy hazards. No wrecking. Repeat: no wrecking. We cover but avoiding inter-in. Delicate."

"Once the department boys get into the act they start pussy-footing around," said April. "Why try to avoid an international incident when the whole darn caboodle down there is directed against all of us?"

Mark shrugged. "The F.B.I. claim that large numbers of genuine foreign nationals—sick people—do actually come to Little Basin. That's why we can't just march on the place. You know how dicey these inter-ins can be. The dipsomatic boys have nightmares about agents shooting one foreign national who is under their protection—which same these sick people are."

"Phooey!" said April. "Sick people might have checked in there one time—when Karadin was building up a front—but not now."

"Don't be bloodthirsty, darling. Read on."

She read on:

"Retreat and contact if infiltration impossible. Major attack set-up discovered Chicago. Suspect others. Keep finger off button. Good luck. A. W."

"Ah—that's better!" said April. "A far more valid reason for no-wrecking attack."

"I think A. W. was pacifying the dipsomatic boys."

"Do you mind not mispronouncing that word? Some of my best friends are diplomats."

"Gertcha!" said Mark. "Most of my best friends aren't. Let 'em be friends with each other—there are enough of them. They don't speak our language, me old darling."

"This finger-off-button bit means that A. W. must be dead sure that Little Basin is their American H.Q."

"And the Chicago bit means even more," said Mark. "With all forces alerted, it's possible they've picked up some lesser agent in Chicago. Maybe more than one. Lesser agents crack easy."

"But they don't always know much."

"Only who tells them to do what, and when."

"So?"

"So A. W. and our Government pals may have cracked the Global Globules alarm system. There won't be anything casual about the way their project swings into major action. To do the greatest harm in the shortest time, they'd have to synchronize the blast-off of their blasted spray—a one-button job for certain."