She looked up at him as he hurried out, with a weary little nod, and then rose abruptly to begin clearing the table.
For a moment he wanted to make some gesture of tenderness toward her, but that generous impulse was quickly swallowed in the unceasing crisis of the project.
The supernova was gone long ago, faded to a telescopic puff of spreading nebular debris, but its harsh sudden rays had kindled something no man could stop.
No matter how his ulcers acted up, the project was something he couldn't abandon.
A hurried three-minute walk, which he felt to be beneficial exercise, brought him to the gleaming steel mesh of the inner fence around the squat, ugly dome of the new concrete building on the north rim of the flat mountain top, which was now his fortress and his prison.
Wondering again what that child could have wanted, he was sorry that he had to be so hard to see.
He had often felt annoyed at the unrelenting efficiency of the Security Police, yet he realized that he had to be protected - from murderous Triplanet agents as well as from stray barefoot waifs.
For the supernova's light had made Starmont a guarded arsenal.
Searchlights played across the tall fence and the uncompromising building inside by night, and armed guards watched always from the four corner towers.
Only six men, beside Forester, were admitted inside the gate.
Those picked technicians slept in the building, ate in their own mess hall, and came outside only in watchful twos.
Spiritless as a convict returning from parole, Forester signed his name in the pass book at the gate and let the guard pin on his numbered badge.
Armstrong inspected him through a wicket at the steel door of the low fortress beyond, let him in, and locked the door again behind him.
"Glad to see you, Chief."
The technician's voice was grave. "Something has us worried."
"That little girl?"
"Don't know anything about her."
Armstrong shrugged.
"But there's a peak on the search drums we thought you ought to see."
Curiously relieved to hear no more of that vanishing urchin, Forester followed him beyond the offices to the huge oval room beneath the heavy concrete dome, where his assistant, Dodge, was watching the search equipment of Project Lookout.
"See that, Chief?" Armstrong pointed at one sharp peak, just slightly higher than many others, in the jagged line a recording pen drew on a slowly turning drum.
"Another neutrino burst.
The plotted co-ordinates place it somewhere in Sector Vermilion.
Think it's strong enough to be significant?"
Forester frowned at that uneven line.
The nominal purpose of Project Lookout was to detect the neutrino bursts from any tests of atomic or rhodomagnetic weapons, on the hostile planets or near in space.
Tiny rectangular spider webs of red-glowing wire revolved ceaselessly in the enormous search tubes towering beneath the center of the dome, sweeping space; and the black- cased directional trackers along the walls were clucking softly to each detected neutrino that triggered their relays, plotting its path.
The gray thickness of curbed concrete above was no barrier to incoming neutrinos, because no possible shielding - either here or around any Triplanet laboratory - could absorb those most tiny and elusive particles of disrupted matter.
Fear of his own discovery betrayed to the enemy had driven Forester to design those tubes, after the computing section had solved problems enough to enable him to predict the rhodomagnetic effects of neutrino-decay.
Each particle that passed those glowing grids wrote its history on the turning drums, revealing the direction of its origin.
But Forester stood scowling, now, at that slightly higher peak on the trace, uncertain what it meant.
Because the detectors were too sensitive, neutrinos too penetrating, the range of the tubes too vast.
Triplanet space fleets were always maneuvering suspiciously in Sector Vermilion, but that was also the direction of the vanished supernova, whose spreading flood of natural neutrinos, a little slower than light, had not yet reached a crest.
"Well, Chief?"
"We had better report it," Forester decided.
"That one burst isn't strong enough to be significant, but look at these." His nervous forefinger followed the line on the drum. "Three other peaks almost as high, made earlier.
Three and a half hours ago, seven, and ten and a half.
That interval happens to be the length of a watch in the Triplanet fleets.
They may be testing something, using the supernova spray for a screen."
"Maybe," Armstrong said.
"But we've picked up stronger bursts that you said were natural peaks in the supernova spray."
That was true, Forester knew, and part of the reason for his ulcers.
He felt incompetent to bear his heavy responsibilities here, because all his training had been for the cautiously tentative weighing and balancing of pure research, not for any decisive action.
"We can't be sure," he agreed uncomfortably.
"That regularity may be just coincidence, but it's too alarming to be ignored."
He dictated a brief bulletin for Armstrong to encode and put on the teleprinter for the Defense Authority.
"I'm going down to work in the lower project," he added.
"Call me if anything breaks."
He hurried back to his own silent office, and through it into the innocent-seeming cloakroom beyond.
Locking the door behind him, he lifted a mirror to punch a hidden button.