THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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diameter like a chimney at one side, and they ran a tunnel out through
solid rock to the head of a canyon half a mile away. Then they buried
the whole thing. Twelve years later, when the War was over, they sealed
both entrances and went away and left it.

For a month each winter, cold rains from the east lashed the desert; for
the rest of the year, it was swept by windblown sand. Wiregrass
sprouted, and thornbush grew; Nature, the master-camoufleur, completed
the work of hiding the forgotten headquarters. Little things not unlike
rabbits scampered over it, and bigger things, vaguely foxlike, hunted
them. Hunted men came, too, their aircars skimming low. None of them had
the least idea what was underneath.

The mesa-top came suddenly to life, just as the sun edged up out of the
east. Conn and his father and Anse Dawes came in first, in the recon-car
with which they had scouted and photographed the site a few days before.
They circled at a thousand feet, fired a smoke bomb, and then let down