The cloakroom dropped, a disguised elevator.
For Project Lookout, however vital the watch it kept, was also a blind for something more important.
The Geiger counters in the new military satellite stations above the atmosphere kept a wider watch against enemy weapons; the graver function of the search installation was to hide the deeper secret of Project Thunderbolt.
Project Thunderbolt had sprung from the supernova's explosion.
It was the chief cause of Forester's breaking health, and the reason he had no time to go with Ruth to Dr. Pitcher.
It was a weapon - of the last, most desperate resort.
Only eight other men shared with him the killing burden of its secret.
Six were the youthful technicians, Armstrong and Dodge and the rest, physically hard and mentally keen, picked and trained for their appalling duty.
The other two were the defense minister and the world president.
And Frank Ironsmith?
Forester frowned, going down in the elevator, puzzled and disturbed when he thought of Ironsmith's call about that urchin at the gate.
Because Ironsmith's job was in the computing section, he had no legitimate knowledge of the project, and its security was no concern of his.
If that indolent clerk had ever drawn any unwise conclusions from the problems brought for him to solve, however, he had kept them to himself.
Exploring his past, in their routine loyalty check, the Security Police had found no cause for suspicion, and Forester could see no reason to mistrust him now.
The secret of the lower project had been efficiently kept, he assured himself.
That hidden elevator dropped him a hundred feet, to a concrete vault in the heart of the mountain.
All the blasting and construction had been done by his own technicians, and all supplies were delivered to the less important project above, which was supported by unaudited grants of discretionary emergency funds.
Not even Ironsmith could know anything about it.
Yet something tightened Forester's stomach muscles with a faint apprehension, now, as he hurried out of the elevator and along the narrow tunnel to the vault.
Snapping on the lights, he peered alertly about the launching station for anything wrong.
The launching tube ran up through the search building, disguised as a ventilator shaft, the gleaming breech mechanism open now and ready.
His searching eyes moved to the missiles racked beneath it.
They were just as he had left them, and a sense of their supreme deadliness lessened his unease.
Turning to the machine shop beside the station, he paused before the newly assembled weapon on a bench there, whose final delicate adjustments had kept him so late last night.
Although Armstrong and the others were trained to launch these most terrible machines and the big sealed safe behind him held all the specifications - if some Triplanet assassin should succeed - he had dared trust no other with all the details of war head, drive, and pilot.
Stroking the cold sleekness of the dural case, he couldn't help feeling a creative pride in this thing he had made.
Slim and tapered and beautiful with precision machining, it was smaller than any of the old atomic weapons, but heavy with an entirely different order of destruction.
Its warhead, smaller than his skinny fist, was designed to shatter a planet.
Its rhodomagnetic drive could far exceed the speed of light, and the relay grid of the auto-pilot invested it with a ruthless mechanical intelligence.
Forester picked up his jewelers' loupe and bent to open the inspection plate above the pilot again, afraid he had somehow failed to set the safety keys to prevent any detonation before the functioning of the drive had released them.
Such a failure could turn Starmont into a small supernova; the fear of it forever harried his sleep, and ate his ulcers deeper.
He found the keys properly set, but that somehow failed to quiet his shapeless anxiety.
Closing the plate again, he wished that he had been a different sort of man, better fitted to carry the lives of planets in his hands.
He knew generals and politicians who actually seemed to envy the less appalling powers they believed him to hold, but no such man, he supposed, could have read the clue in the supernova's spectrum.
"Please, mister!" The child spoke to him timidly as he turned from the missile.
She was coming out of the narrow passage from the elevator, walking on bare silent feet.
One grimy paw was deep in the pocket of her yellow dress, and she was trembling as if to some desperate resolution, her voice dry with fright.
"Please - are you Dr. Forester?"
Chapter FIVE
FORESTER STARTED to an incredulous alarm.
His jewelers' lens fell and clattered with a shocking sound on the steel floor, and rolled through a ladder well down into the power plant on the level below.
Because no intruder should be here. Even the six technicians were not allowed to enter this vault except on duty, in twos to watch each other.
He stumbled back against the bench, gasping sharply:
"How did you get in?"
He believed himself a mild and kindly man.
His mirror showed the perpetual frown that worry had etched into his thin features, but he was still a wistful, harmless-seeming gnome of a man, slight and stooped and brown.
He felt a flicker of hurt astonishment at the child's voiceless fear of him, before shocked dismay made him rasp again.
"Who let you down here?"
His voice went up, too shrill.
For security and peace had been swept out of his life, by the very being of Project Thunderbolt.