Van Riker had not worked so hard to design this installation for an ordinary missile. No, this missile was the Cassandra, and because it was the Cassandra, only one living man could know where it was and what it was. The supervisor had suspected this when he had begun to realize how this missile differed from others. So out went the quiet man with the drinking problem, who had been on the wagon for a long time. Even to this detail had Van Riker planned.

"I'm sorry, gentlemen," he said, knowing no one could hear him on the Montana prairie, "but there are millions whose lives will be saved by this. Maybe billions, because, gentlemen, this device should save us from a nuclear war." And then he thought of the layers of bodies he was standing on—bodies that had fallen there thousands of years before Christ and then in 1873 and now in 1961. Perhaps if the rest of the plan worked, there would never be another war, Van Riker thought.

He drove the truck along the dusty dirt road for about seventy miles before he saw human life—the small Apowa Indian reservation. He left the truck in a military parking field fifty miles farther east and without even checking to see if he had taken the keys from the ignition, he caught a commercial liner for the Bahamas, where he had an estate with very efficient telephones connected directly to the Pentagon.

By the time Van Riker felt the first warmth of the Bahamas sun, a new air attaché was arriving at the United States Embassy in Moscow. He had a meeting scheduled in the Kremlin and had specified some of the men who must be there. He had named some scientists and military men and NKVD personnel, and—to the Russians' surprise—he named a man whose identity they had thought was secret, a man whom even most of the high-level NKVD foreign-bureau staffers did not know. Valashnikov.