ears, threatening sanity.

For someone had been indiscreet. The crowd had the Word, and had become the beast.

Bomb!

It was exactly 11:18 when they broke. In the history of that decade there had been no comparable disaster. Nine died. Thousands were injured. They poured down the spiral causeways like the flood of spring rains over a dam, and it was said later that only the superb designing job of the architect, Christopher Berthold, prevented casualties from being much higher.

It required twenty minutes to clear the building. It would have taken six, if it could have been done in orderly fashion.

The police were to clear the sector of the city for three miles in each direction. There was no need. No citizen stopped running half so near as that. Of course, later on, when the panic had subsided, the streets had to be roped off and guarded to prevent them from trooping back, for fear they might miss something. That was human nature, and to be expected.

The diplomats were herded, with diplomacy, into the Grand Solar Hotel in another part of the city, and closely guarded. The Friendship Tower, looming whitely against the skyline, was suddenly vacant.

Well, almost vacant. In the great meeting hall, at the table which dwarfed even his respectable figure, sat the delegate from Saturn, Dr. Gor Jeetl, obediently following the orders of Terran authorities. He was the merest speck in the vast place, and if there had been any there to see, they would have noted a stolid determination in the set of his mouth—the look of a dedicated man.

For, after all, it had been Saturn's plan, people said, merely to destroy the building; the destruction of ten thousand beings had been, in itself, incidental, it it had occurred. The fission bomb planted in Gor Jeetl's belly through some incredible operation would accomplish its purpose, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

The City Fathers had gathered on a rooftop, five miles away, to watch the destruction. Some of the most important men on Earth were there. Observation wings cautiously shied around the area, taking last pictures, waiting for the grandest shot of all.

Some felt sorry for Chris Berthold, the man who had spent five years designing the Friendship Tower. But Berthold was not there. He had other things on his mind.

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