"Perhaps you will not be quite so hasty with your men's lives in the future, Captain?" the doctor said.
Professor Schultz was spinning dials. "No contact," the professor said, "No contact at all."
That had been six months ago. Three more test rockets had been fired successfully before the urgent report came through from Alaskan Observation Post No. 4. A rocket was coming across the Pole.
The strange rocket was tracked and escorted by atomic armed fighters all the way to the Rocket Testing Station where it cut its own motors and gently landed. In the center of a division of atomic-armed infantry the captain, the doctor, and everyone else, waited impatiently. There was an air of uneasiness.
"You're sure it's not ours?" Captain Baird asked.
The doctor laughed. "Identical, yes, but three times the size of ours."
"Perhaps one of the Asian ones?"
"No, it's our design, but too large, much too large."
Professor Schultz put their thoughts into words. "Looks like someone copied ours. Someone, somewhere. It's hard to imagine, but true nevertheless."
They waited two weeks. Nothing happened. Then a radiation-shielded team went in to examine the rocket. Two more weeks and the strange rocket was dismantled and spread over the field of the testing station. The rocket was dismantled and the station had begun to talk to itself in whispers and look at the sky.