THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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of what it was worth. At least they wouldn't have to sell it by the ton.

The tunnel ended in an enormous room a couple of hundred feet square and
fifty high. There was a wide aisle up the middle; on either side,
contragravity equipment was massed. Tanks with long 90-mm guns. Combat
cars. Small airboats. Rank on rank of air-cavalry single-mounts,
egg-shaped things just big enough for a man to sit in, with quadruple
machine guns in front and flame-jets behind. Ambulances armored against
radiation; decontamination units; mobile workshops; mobile kitchens.
Troop carriers, jeeps, staff cars; power shovels, manipulators, lifters.
All waiting, for forty years, to swarm out as soon as the bombs that
never came stopped falling.

They floated the jeep along hallways beyond, and got down to look into
rooms. Work was already going on in the power plant; a gang under a slim
young man whom Anse introduced as Mohammed Matsui were using
repair-robots to get canisters of live plutonium out of a reactor.