"We'll excuse you," Barby said quickly. "Only please start!"
Gordon smiled at her. "Can you keep secrets?"
"I always have," Barby retorted.
"All right. Then you can listen. But what I say must not be repeated."
The scientist paused long enough to drain his glass of milk and refill it from the pitcher.
"Well, to begin with, we moved from New Mexico to Nevada only a short while ago, in order to separate our work from military research. We created a new test base in Nevada, not too far from the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada Test Site, although we have no connection with it."
"Then you're not on a military project?" Scotty asked.
"Yes and no. The work is sponsored jointly by the Department of Defense and some other agencies, including the National Science Foundation. However, we are not working on military projects, in the sense that our rockets are not weapons. They're for research purposes. Of course some of the things we're doing will be valuable for military application later, and so our test base is closed to the public and most of our work has a high classification. Usually the work is secret, but sometimes it's top secret. Is that clear?"
Scotty and the Brants agreed that it was.
"Very well. Since we operate under security, every person who works on the base is fully investigated and cleared for top secret. This is an important point. You know how thorough these investigations are. Once a security check for top secret is completed, there is literally nothing of importance that isn't known about a person. But in spite of the most careful security work, there is someone on our base about whom we do not know everything.