Unknown to Roger Lorin, events which would shape the course of the next few weeks, and would ultimately change his whole life were taking place far to the south. A third party had entered the political stage of the Western Hemisphere. The League of Islam had finally decided to do something about an incident which it had never forgiven. Over thirty years earlier, the Union had sent marines into the Suez Canal area to stop alleged assaults against American citizens. In a sense, the North American Union had indicated that it thought of the League of Islam as nothing more than a backward group, which could be pacified whenever trouble arose within its borders. The insult had never been forgotten by the fanatically nationalistic Moslems. Only the greater military might of the North American power had prevented a war at that time. Now, the League had decided that the time was ripe to gain immunity from such insults forever by some shrewd political maneuvering.
Working through a small dissatisfied political party in South America, they used the North's development of neutron energy to create fear in the minds of the people of the southern republic. By stimulating this fear, the Arabs hoped to weaken both powers through war, and thereby to gain power and prestige among the nations. The League hoped to gain through political devices what it could never get in open war.
Up to January 5, 2055, the leaders of the western hemispheric powers did not realize what was actually taking place. But then reports began coming into the offices of the investigators of both nations which changed the picture.
On January 2, an American oil well in the Gulf of Mexico had been blown up. The saboteur was not caught, since the bomb had been cleverly hidden sometime before the explosion. Two days later, in the state of Venezuela, an official of the South American government was shot and killed. Although the assassin escaped after a grueling two day chase and was never really identified, there were plenty of rumor mongers to remind the people that the dead official had held opinions that were not favorable to the North American Union. Accompanied by such incidents friction between the two nations grew.
The events that set the pot to boiling, and nearly caused it to boil over occurred at Arctic City. Up to this time, Roger Lorin had considered the reports of such incidents as news that seemed rather unreal, because of its distance from his immediate affairs. Now, however, he found himself in the middle of the trouble between the two nations. Although he scarcely knew it, he had become a key man on the neutron pile project. His research into the physics of interatomic and intermolecular forces had aided materially the work on the pile.
It started, innocently enough, during the early afternoon of January 9, when a group of ten men ostensibly bound for a mining town farther north, took a guided tour of the pile area. About one sixth of the reaction cells into which the pile was divided for convenience, were in operation; and the six converter tubes were aglow with greenish yellow light. The entrance of the men into the central chamber was the signal. A previously planted bomb exploded with enough violence to shatter the tubes; filling the converter room with greenish yellow fire and hard radiations.
A smoke bomb provided extra screening and the group hurried down a side tunnel under cover of the gray mantle. Roger heard the sounds of confusion accompanied by the clangor of an alarm bell, announcing that hard radiations were loose somewhere in the plant. He stepped to the door of the lab, and a gas gun exploded in his face. He knew nothing more, until he awoke aboard a fast moving jet.
The convertiplane winged through the Arctic twilight for nearly two hours, and finally came down on a flat stretch of snow covered tundra, near the shore of the Arctic Ocean. A group of three dome huts stood at the base of a low cliff. Otherwise, the scene was one of silent, dark desolation.
One of the men handed Roger a pair of insulated, electrically heated coveralls. Roger put them on without argument. Next, the man motioned toward the hatch with a machine pistol. "Get movin'," he snapped. "Make it quick. And don't try to run for it. You wouldn't get far."
Roger dropped through the hatch and waited quietly. When his captors finally dropped through the hatch, they steered him none too gently toward the middle hut.