“There’ll be bulletins all over Bootstrap,” she observed, “saying that Braun tried to dust-bomb the Shed. They’ll say that he may have carried the cobalt about with him, and so he may have burned other people—in a restaurant, a movie theater, anywhere—while he was carrying the dust and dying without knowing it. So everybody’s supposed to report to the hospital for a check-up for radiation burns. Some people may really have them. But Dad thinks that since you weren’t burned, Braun didn’t carry it around. If anyone is burned, it’ll be the person who brought the cobalt here to give him. And—well—he’ll turn up because everybody does, and because he’s burned he’ll be asked plenty of questions.”
Joe stepped on the starter. Then he pressed the accelerator and the car sped forward.
They stopped at the house in the officers’-quarters area on the other side of the Shed. Sally picked up the lunch basket that her father’s housekeeper had packed on telephoned instructions. They drove away.
Red Canyon was eighty miles from the Shed, and the only way to get there was through Bootstrap, because the only highway away from the Shed led to that small, synthetic town. It was irritating, though they had no schedule, to find that the long line of busses was ahead of them on that twenty-mile stretch. The busses ran nose to tail and filled the road for a half-mile or more. It was not possible to pass so long a string of close-packed vehicles. There was just enough traffic in the opposite direction to make that impracticable.
They had to trail the line of busses as far as Bootstrap and crawl through the crowded streets. Once beyond the town they came to a security stop. Here Sally’s pass was good. Then they went rolling on and on through an empty, arid, sun-baked terrain toward the hills to the west. It looked remarkably lonely. Joe thought for the first time about gas. He looked carefully at the fuel gauge. Sally shook her head.
“Don’t worry. Plenty of gas. Security takes care of that. When I said where we were going and that I wanted the car, Dad had everything checked. If I live through this, I’ll bet I stay a fanatic about cautiousness all my life!”
Joe said distastefully: “I suppose it gets everybody. Mike—the midget, you know—called me back just now to suggest that the people who tried to spoil the gyros might try to harm the four of us to hinder their repair!”
“It’s not just foolishness,” Sally admitted. “The strain is pretty bad, especially when you know things. You’ve noticed that Dad’s getting gray. That’s strain. And Miss Ross is about as tense. Things leak out in the most remarkable way—and Dad can’t find out how. Once there was a case of sabotage and he could have sworn that nobody had the information that permitted it but himself and Miss Ross. She had hysterics. She insisted that she wanted to be locked up somewhere so she couldn’t be suspected of telling anybody anything. She’d resign tomorrow if she could. It’s ghastly.” Then she hesitated and smiled faintly: “In fact, so Dad wouldn’t worry about me this afternoon——”
He took his eyes off the road to glance at her.
“What?”