With a last astonished look at the vastness of that ship and the silent machines still swarming from it, the driver pulled back on the road.
"The world sure changes," he commented sagely. "What won't they think of next!"
Back at Starmont, Forester hurried down to the project without even taking time to call Ruth, and worked that night and all the next day without sleep, modifying three missiles.
Light would take two long centuries to reach Wing IV, but these tapered shapes of death had their own dreadful geometry.
The time quantity, in the equations of rhodomagnetic propulsion, varied with the fourth root of distance. Wing IV, consequently, was only a few seconds farther than the nearest planet.
When the third missile was ready at last, with drive and relays rebuilt, Forester went to sleep in his coveralls on a cot beside the launching station.
The teleprinter bell awoke him instantly - and he saw that the time was somehow nine, next morning.
The brief message from the defense minister was classified top secret. It warned him to be ready for a humanoid inspector, arriving within an hour.
Quickly checking the three modified missiles again, he left them racked and ready.
Back at the surface, he locked the elevator, pushed the mirror down to hide the controls, kicked a rug over the escape door in the floor, hung his coveralls on a hook, and walked out of an innocent cloakroom into his office, to wait for the inspection.
The mechanical came on a military aircraft, escorted by the commanding general of the satellite space stations and his retinue.
A staff car brought them from the landing strip below the mountain, and Forester waited to meet them at the inner gate.
The machine stepped out ahead of the men, droning its greeting:
"Service, Dr. Clay Forester."
In the midst of the stiff military uniforms, the slender silicone nakedness of the humanoid had a curious incongruity, but that oddness was not amusing.
Its air of kindly blind alertness was somehow disturbing, and Forester couldn't help an uncomfortable start when it spoke his name.
"We have come to examine your Project Lookout." Its voice was a mellow golden horn.
"Under the provisional agreement, we are to patrol all military installations, to prevent any aggressions before the ratification election.
Then we shall remove all weapons."
"But this project isn't a weapon," Forester protested.
"Like the satellite stations, it's only part of the warning network."
He couldn't tell what the humanoid thought; nothing ever changed that serene expression of slightly astonished paternal benevolence.
But the machine went methodically ahead with a painstaking study of the building, the instruments, and the staff.
The inspection became a cruel ordeal which lasted all day.
Even when the human members of the party went to lunch at the cafeteria, the mechanical kept Forester to explain the deliberately sketchy records he had kept.
"We have secured access to the secret files of the Defense Authority," it purred blandly.
"We have seen figures for the discretionary funds spent on this project, and lists of the items of equipment purchased for it.
Can you tell us why those totals are so large, and why so much of that equipment does not appear to be in use here?"
"Certainly." He tried not to look so ill as he felt.
"This was an experimental installation, remember, and men aren't quite so efficient as you machines claim to be.
We made several expensive blunders in the design, and all that missing equipment was torn out and hammered into scrap long ago."
"Our coming will end such waste," the mechanical murmured, and he could see no other reaction.
Even the humanoids, he thought grimly, would find it difficult to prove that those missing items had not already gone to the furnaces as scrap metal, but he was afraid to wonder what other clues to Project Thunderbolt their sleepless prying might uncover.
The inscrutable machine took him back, that afternoon, to the neutrino trackers.
Its blind- seeming steel eyes stared blankly at the enormous search tubes, with their tiny grids of glowing wire forever sweeping space.
It studied the softly clucking counters and the directional plotters.
It made him dig all the specifications out of a safe, and inquired the name and address of every firm which had supplied any materials, and finally interviewed each of the six technicians.
As the inquisition dragged on, Forester felt increasingly tired and annoyed and alarmed.
He hadn't slept enough, and his empty stomach fluttered uncomfortably.
He was afraid his own agitation might betray the project, and when the machine had finished grilling Armstrong, at dusk, he asked it desperately:
"Isn't that enough?
You've seen everything, and talked to all of us.
Aren't you satisfied?"
"Thank you, sir," cooed the humanoid,
"But there is one other man connected with the project whom we must question.
That is the mathematician who calculated the designs for the search equipment."
"All the routine math was done in our own computing section."
"Who operates that?"
"A young chap named Ironsmith." Forester's voice rose, too sharply.
"But he had nothing to do with the actual equipment.