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physicist had detected any electromagnetic pulse related to such phenomena--hence, none existed, in all likelihood.

    Since his nameless dread ebbed as rapidly as he searched for its source, Ben gave a mental shrug and shut his eyes again. It was a long time afterward when he would recall that just before he fell asleep, for a second time, his mind did fix momentarily on the hazardous circumstances in which modern men had lived, decade after decade: the madness of civilization that had reached a peak at which it could eradicate itself. But that fear, almost a generation old, was not then connected by the physicist with his awakening or its sensed cause: an undefined anxiety.

    When he opened his eyes again, it was light. He thought he heard splashing sounds beyond his curtained glass wall and wondered, hopefully, if it was raining. He rose, donned a dressing gown, and drew the traverse curtains.

    Vance Farr was swimming in the moat, his short, sturdy body in easy motion.
    Moat . . . or pool. Or whatever they called it. Farr's red hair was darkened by the water, and his face, square, solid, amiable, turned toward the watching man with every other stroke. Its blue, open eyes must have seen the curtain draw, for Farr stopped swimming, began treading water, and beckoned. When Ben smiled, nodded, Farr grinned back and waited. In a matter of a minute Ben stepped outside. The flagstone rim of the moat was already hot on his bare feet. Farr waved.

    "Hi!" Ben felt cheerful. Liked Farr.

    The tycoon had an astonishingly versatile brain. He was genial and congenial.
    Thinking about him, as Ben often had done, he'd felt Farr did not quite fit the big-business mold. He was too imaginative and too learned. Too unconcentrated. Above all else, too observant. For it had always seemed to Ben that Farr was the most noticing man he'd ever met.

    Ben's greeting brought a challenge from the swimming man: "I always go clear around the place, mornings, if I have time." Farr chuckled, spit water, and added, "And if the moat has water in it and the water doesn't happen to be frozen."

    "How far is a lap?"

    Vance replied as only he would, "Nineteen hundred and sixty-two yards and three inches--outside dimension. Bit over a mile. But I've done about a third of it. Game?"

    Ben nodded. "Race you." He dived.

    It wasn't a fair race, Ben realized, after they'd covered a hundred yards. The older man had energy and endless courage but he couldn't keep up with a competitor who was not only a foot taller but an ex-water-polo player and one, besides, who took a workout daily in the water--the pool inside the apartment where he lived, or on one of Long Island's beaches.

    There, Ben now reflected, slowing down to keep even with Farr, this very Friday, some of his Brookhaven colleagues would beyond doubt soon be ranged along an Atlantic-facing beach and, certainly, talking physics or math while they drew diagrams in the sand. As he swam--almost languidly, for him--Ben recalled a scalding afternoon in August, two summers ago, when Kleinschmidt had suddenly hit on a new concept that explained how and why low-energy particles failed to obey the laws of parity that the other particles followed precisely.

    Sitting on the sand, drawing diagrams and scribbling equations in it, while the girls accompanying the men watched, bored but unable to stop the demonstration.

    And, Ben mused on, at noon this very day Kleinschmidt and whoever else was hanging around the labs at Columbia University would hold their immemorial "Chinese lunch"--the weekly meal-and-brains gathering that might continue a noon session through dinner or even far into the night. Even all night, if what was "started" over the soups, the dumplings, proved sufficiently interesting.

    Both men pulled themselves out of the moat at the terrace, where Farr had started.
    Ben wasn't even panting, which Farr noticed with no comment.

    "Get in last night?" Ben asked.

    "Around two this morning." Farr took a huge