"What the hell do you mean? An old friend?"

"It has the number 101 painted on it in green."

Kathy jerked upright. "That's the one that was the first to land at Lone Pine," she said. "One of the federal observers painted the number on it. She was the one who had the babies."

"She?"

"Well, it had babies, didn't it? That makes it a she in my book.

How come I missed that story?"

"It never got in the paper," said Garrison. "Got crowded out.

Showed up in the slop. I rescued it. We'll get it in tonight. I don't know how it happened."

"We have to watch things like that," said Lathrop. "That's a good story. We should have run it."

"Al, it happens now and then. Not often. But it does happen. It's just one of those things. I've been wondering if Kathy should go down to Iowa and look into the situation. The visitor might remember her."

"That's ridiculous," said Lathrop. "Not a single one of them has paid any attention to a human."

"How do we know?" asked Garrison. "Sure, none of them has wandered over and said hello, but that doesn't mean they don't notice people. Kathy was at Lone Pine for several days and.

"What good would it do if old 101 did remember her? There's no way to interview one of them. No way at all to get any information out of them."

"I know all that," said the city editor. "I just have a hunch. I don't think it would be a bad idea."

"All right. Go ahead. You run the city room. If you have a hunch.

The door burst open and Jim Gold thrust through it.

"Johnny," he said, "Frank Norton's on the phone from Lone Pine. Stiffy Grant has just found a dead one."

"A dead what?"

"A dead visitor," said Gold.

32. WASHINGTON, D.C

Porter picked up the phone. "Dave," said the President, "can you come in? There's something I want you to hear."

"Immediately, Mr. President," said Porter.

He put the phone back in the cradle and got out of his chair. From her desk in the corner, his assistant, Marcia Langley, looked inquiringly at him.

"I don't know," said Porter. "More than likely trouble of one sort or another."

As he came into the outer office he made a thumb at the door to the President's office and asked, "Who is in there with him?"

"General Whiteside," said Grace.

"Only Whiteside?"

"Only Whiteside. He arrived a couple of minutes ago.

Porter knocked on the door and opened it. The President was perched on one corner of his desk and Whiteside was sitting in a chair against the wall.

"Come in, Dave," said the President. "Pull up a chair. The general has something rather strange to tell us."

"Thank you, sir," said Porter.

The President went around his desk and sat behind it, facing the two of them.

"I hear you had a rough half-hour with the press this afternoon. ,

"They wanted to know about some weapon test. I told them I had not heard of it."

The President nodded. "That's good. How did that sort of little white lie go down with you?"

"Sir," said Porter, "most things can be talked about and should, but I assumed the test, if not a security matter, at least, was highly confidential."

"It's a good thing you assumed that," Vv7hiteside said sourly.

"Which I take to mean that it might be a long time before anything at all can be said of it."

"That's why I asked you in," said the President. "I respect you and your viewpoint sufficiently that I don't want to leave you operating in a vacuum. When you hear what Henry has to say, I think you'll agree it should be kept under cover."

He nodded at Whiteside. "If you'll run through it again, Henry."

The general settled himself more firmly in his chair. "I think that both of you are familiar with the exercise. We mounted a.30 caliber and took movies of the bullet's path, thousands of frames a second."

The President nodded. "Yes, we know."

"It was incredible," said Whiteside.

"O.K., Henry. Go ahead and tell us.

"When the bullet struck the visitor," said the general, "the skin of the visitor indented. The bullet did not penetrate. It simply made a dimple in the thing's hide. Like pushing a fist into a feather pillow. Like pushing a finger into your cheek. Then, almost immediately, the dimple rebounded back to its original position and a flare of energy bounced back, striking the mounted rifle and melting it. The funny thing about it is that the bullet itself, the projectile, was not thrown back, not all the way, that is. It bounced back for a short distance, then fell. Later we found it on the ground, where it had fallen."

The general stopped talking for a moment, sucking in his breath.

"Our people tell us," he said, "that is, our scientists tell us, that the visitor converted the kinetic energy of the projectile into potential energy. Doing that, you see, so that the energy could be handled. It's not absolutely certain, but indications are that the Visitor absorbed the potential energy, analyzed it, and tossed back an even bigger flare of raw energy that destroyed the weapon. It struck the weapon square, dead-on, and that, the scientists say, is because the indentation was a parabolic indentation, its axis along the line of the projectile's trajectory. The indentation bounced back to its original position, but the shape of it was so precise that it threw back the energy, in some new form, exactly to its source. The scientists talked about a wave pulse or a reflected wave, but they lost me on that one. The point is that the visitor flung back the energy of the projectile, or at least that much, straight into the weapon that fired it. Even if the shot had been a lobbing shot, say, from a mortar, the return blast of energy would have followed precisely the trajectory of the projectile."

He paused, sucking in his breath again, looking from one to the other.

"Do you realize what that means?" he asked.

"A perfect defense system," said the President. "You toss back to the other fellow whatever he throws at you."

Whiteside nodded. "And perhaps in different forms of energy. That's what the people at the lab think, anyhow. It wouldn't have to be a blast of heat. It might be radiation—say, a storm of gamma rays. The visitor can convert kinetic energy to potential energy and it may have a wide choice of energy conversions.

"How many people, besides the three of us, know of this?" asked the President.

"Quite a number of people, service technicians, troops and so forth, witnessed the exercise. If you mean what I've just told you, only three others than ourselves."

"They can be trusted?"

"They can be trusted. There'll be no talk."

"I think, to be on the safe side," said the President, "we must insist the firing test never happened. Would you go along with that, Dave? I know how you feel.

"Much as it goes against my grain," said Porter, "I would agree I'd have to. But it will be difficult to keep the cover on. Some of the servicemen, possibly some of the technicians, will talk. Isn't there some other way it can be done? Say yes, there was a test, but there were no clear-cut results, that what little data we got was confusing and inconclusive."

"My advice," said Whiteside, "is that we stonewall it. That's life only safe way."

"Dave," said the President, "I've never asked you to cover up before. I'm asking you to cover up now. There was, of course, the matter of the object in orbit beginning to break up. I think I made a mistake on that one. You argued for full disclosure, but I weaseled on you. I made a mistake. I should have turned you loose rather than using the NASA announcement. But this is a different matter."

"This," said Whiteside, "could give us the edge we need. If we only can find out how it's done."

"We could call in Allen."