The loudspeaker was counting down to Two Hours One Minute.

“Could you spare a few minutes to talk to the press?” Eugenio Galvez asked.  “And perhaps say a few words for telecast?  This last is most important; we can’t explain too many times the purpose of this experiment.  There is still much hostility, arising from fear that we are testing a nuclear weapon.”

The press and telecast services were well represented; there were close to a hundred correspondents, from all over South America, from South Africa and Australia, even one from Ceylon.  They had three trucks, with mobile telecast pickups, and when they saw who was approaching, they released the two rocketry experts they had been quizzing and pounced on the new victims.

Was there any possibility that negative-proton matter might be used as a weapon?

“Anything can be used as a weapon; you could stab a man to death with that lead pencil you’re using,” Pitov replied.  “But I doubt if negamatter will ever be so used.  We’re certainly not working on weapons design here.  We started, six years ago, with the ability to produce negative protons, reverse-spin neutrons, and positrons, and the theoretical possibility of assembling them into negamatter.  We have just gotten a fifty kilogramme mass of nega-iron assembled.  In those six years, we had to invent all our techniques, and design all our equipment.  If we’d been insane enough to want to build a nuclear weapon, after what we went through up North, we could have done so from memory, and designed a better—­which is to say a worse—­one from memory in a few days.”

“Yes, and building a negamatter bomb for military purposes would be like digging a fifty foot shaft to get a rock to bash somebody’s head in, when you could do the job better with the shovel you’re digging with,” Richardson added.  “The time, money, energy and work we put in on this thing would be ample to construct twenty thermonuclear bombs.  And that’s only a small part of it.”  He went on to tell them about the magnetic bottle inside the rocket’s warhead, mentioning how much electric current was needed to keep up the magnetic field that insulated the negamatter from contact with posimatter.

“Then what was the purpose of this experiment, Doctor Richardson?”

“Oh, we were just trying to find out a few basic facts about natural structure.  Long ago, it was realized that the nucleonic particles—­protons, neutrons, mesons and so on—­must have structure of their own.  Since we started constructing negative-proton matter, we’ve found out a few things about nucleonic structure.  Some rather odd things, including fractions of Planck’s constant.”

A couple of the correspondents—­a man from La Prensa, and an Australian—­whistled softly.  The others looked blank.  Pitov took over: