"It's after three o'clock," was the devastating reply, as Toby led him toward the cellar stairs. The General wondered briefly how much he had managed to forget in his fifty-two years.
Angus MacReedy was working at his carving table with a blow-up of the spy-pictures tacked to the cellar wall in front of him, a pile of rough-sketched plans on the table. He rose and said, "I was just doing a little polishing, General. But you hit it about right."
"Good," said the General. "Got it solved?"
"I think so," said the model-maker. "Take a look."
It was an eerie-looking item—a sort of stove-pipe mounted on a disc, surrounded by a flock of flying buttresses. Frowning the General peered at it, then looked at the blow-ups on the walls. From the correct angle, the similarity was ominously unmistakable. He said, "What in hell is it, Captain?"
MacReedy grinned. "Looks weird, doesn't it? It had me stumped for the better part of a week. There's only one thing it could be and that's what it is. Look...."
He picked up a sort of miniature torpedo from the work-table, dropped it down the stove-pipe. The thing worked like a trench-mortar. Some spring in the base of the tube sent the rocket flying in a high arc to smack the opposite wall and drop to the floor.
"It's a mobile rocket-launcher," he said needlessly. "I'd lay odds it can be used for atomic warheads."
"Good Lord!" cried the General. His mind was in a racing turmoil. The problem with the Nazi V-1 and V-2 weapons during World War Two had been the immobility of their launching platforms. If They had managed to get around it....
He thought of an insuperable obstacle, said, "But what about back-blast? Don't tell me they've found a metal able to stand up under the heat of launching."