you, there can be no trickery against the State. No—don't say it! It is not you I could distrust—it is everyone I must distrust. But not now. What does the doctor say?"

"Another year." For a time they had been afraid that Stefanie could never have children again, but the new treatments had apparently been effective. Centralia's progress in all phases of gynecology had been spectacular.

The Director nodded. "Good. The State needs such children as you will have. And a man has need of little ones. But tell me—you still feel sure of this test?"

Then the talk became technical. Johann was sure. There had been smaller tests, during the two years the project had been going on, and all of them had been effective.

Then cold fingers ran over him, tingling at the ends of his nerves, as he realized the trick semantics was playing on him.

Test? It had been the name they had given it, and in time it had come to be no more than that in his mind—a test of his theories. But this was not just a test. This was the feat itself, the step that would bring an end to half the world, the culmination of the hopes of Centralia, and the final, positive proof of the ideas of Volcek.

He had been almost unaware of the power that had grown from his idea, but now it hit him. It wasn't easy to do that to half a world, even in these days. But it had to be done.

Thirty years before, there had been a sprawling group of small nations and several large powers. But with the beginning of the atomic age, that had shaken itself down until now there were actually only the two hemispheres. Centralia had most of the world's population, but the West had achieved equality by its head-start in the sciences and in industry. For thirty years, little nation had accreted to big nation, until now there were the two of them. Nominally, the little nations still existed; but it was a polite fiction, like the fiction of bland softness the Director had adopted before Stefanie.

And this was not a world where two powers could exist. They had somehow achieved it, while the accretion of control over the neighboring states went on. There had been fracas piled onto struggle, but never outright war. Now, though, things had reached a stage where each side knew that sooner or later the hydrogen-bombs must fall, and where those bombs were of a size and efficiency that might even end the world. There were even rumors of solar-phoenix bombs 

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