He inspected the incubators near the long steaming tables of the hydroponic garden. A tray about ready to hatch. They'd have to start assembling eggs to replace it in the morning. He paused in the third room, filled a gap in the bookshelves.

“Hope Josephine steadies the boy in his schoolwork. If he fails that next exam, they'll make me send him to town regularly. Now there's an aspect of survival I can hit Herbie with.”

He realized he'd been talking to himself, a habit he'd been combating futilely for more than a month. Stuffy talk, too. He was becoming like those people who left tracts on trolley cars.

“Have to start watching myself,” he commented. “Dammit, again!”

The telephone clattered upstairs. He heard Ann walk across to it, that serene, unhurried walk all pregnant women seem to have.

“Elliot! Nat Medarie.”

“Tell him I'm coming, Ann.” He swung the vault-like door carefully shut behind him, looked at it for a moment, and started up the high stone steps.

“Hello, Nat. What's new?”

“Hi, Plunk. Just got a postcard from Fitzgerald. Remember him? The abandoned silver mine in Montana? Yeah. He says we've got to go on the basis that lithium bombs will be used.”

Plunkett leaned against the wall with his elbow. He cradled the receiver on his right shoulder so he could light a cigarette. “Fitzgerald can be wrong sometimes.”

“Uhm. I don't know. But you know what a lithium bomb means, don't you?”

“It means,” Plunkett said, staring through the wall of the house and into a boiling Earth, “that a chain reaction maybe set off in the atmosphere if enough of them are used. Maybe if only one—”

“Oh, can it,” Medarie interrupted. “That gets us nowhere. That way nobody gets through, and we might as well start shuttling from church to bar-room like my brother-in-law in Chicago is doing right now. Fred, I used to say to him—No, listen, Plunk: it means I was right. You didn't dig deep enough.”