had been holding back suddenly welled out and came streaming down. She held him close and gave him her lips for a long time. She kissed away his own hurt and his own failure and in turn regained her own happy dream of future. Then they parted very gently and were not quite willing to look one another in the eye.

"I've got to run," she said at last. She shook her head unhappily. "I've got to go and get a few things done before dad can pull the string."

"I—"

"It's my worry and I'll do the worrying," she said firmly. "Your job is to go back to work and see what you missed in this doodad. Promise?"

"I—"

Norma's tears dried up swiftly. "We're a fine combination so long as we both let each other do his own particular job," she said, catching his hand and holding it tight. "You make with the mechanics and I'll make with the finances, and if we can both do those at the same time, we'll have time between to make love. But I've got to get going, Peter."

He watched her go.

Then he turned back to his equipment. He felt like kicking the bombarder, but he knew that the block of concrete that shielded the bombarder would protect the instrument; in fact, the concrete was probably harder than the device itself. He would only hurt himself by such a show of childish anger.

He considered the whole gear analytically. Something was missing. The binding force that connected atom to atom and molecule to molecule had not been properly transmitted.

IV

In the days that followed, Peter Mansfield re-read all the books he could find on binding energies. He studied meson theory and he computed packing fraction energies. He bombarded elements as pure as he could find, and he measured the resultant gamma radiation as close as he could measure it. Something was missing, all right. The binding force radiated off in a random pattern that he could not collect and direct through his parabolic reflector. Neutrinos were spinning off at any odd angle; positron holes sucked in corrective energies; he even detected the evanescent negatron as it came into being and dissipated in a gout of annihilation energy.

He caught what looked like the evidence of the proposed but never detected anti-neutron, although he himself was far from sure just how anything could consist of factors 

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