A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.
"Our Grand Chairman will see you now," she said in a quiet voice.
Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.
She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.
Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.
But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.
"Good Lord!" Don gasped. "That's an atomic reactor down there!" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.