"How can I stop them?" wailed Jane.

Call President Morgan. You can do that, he wrote. Let the President put a stop to it!

Jane nodded and went to the telephone. Dave followed. I'm putting this crystal in Merion, he said. I've been away too long—they will be getting suspicious.

"Dave," cried Jane, helplessly looking for him. It was hard on Dave, for he knew what she wanted and was unable to stand where her eyes were trying to focus. He gave up and watched her eyes look aside and through him, unable to help her see him as he could see her. "Dave," she cried plaintively, "come back to me!"

When I can, he promised.

Jane waved the pad. "I have that in writing," she said. Her face showed it to be a hard try at humor.

Dave tapped her gently on the forehead with the crystal, and then it took off in a long swoop towards the window as he left. He did not know, but he assumed that a certain amount of time must be permitted the placers of those crystals since the operator could not open a door, nor must he permit the crystal to be seen floating through a busy corridor. How much of this grace period he had left he did not know, but he wanted the crystal placed under the eye of the television cameras of the enemy before they became suspicious.

The crystal was a deadly thing under any circumstances, but now it was like a gallon tin of nitroglycerine; Jane, knowing the facts, would keep people out of its sphere of death.

Meanwhile, as Dave drove the helicopter towards Merion, the avalanche of action that he had initiated was rolling higher and higher.

A common, garden-variety citizen of no especial degree of public acclaim is normally supposed to be able to shake the President by the hand and/or complain about the weather or the administration, or taxes, or anything. It has never been determined just what might happen if Peter Doakes, of South Burlap, Idaho, became possessed of vital information that must be handed to the President within the hour. Without a doubt the country would be blown sky-high by the time Mr. Doakes succeeded in proving to ninety-odd undersecretaries that he had something truly important and was not a crank or a crackpot. But Dr. Jane Nolan of Merion Atomic Laboratory had both a name and a reputation, and when she placed her call to the White House, it took her exactly twelve minutes to convince the powers that be that 

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