Before the sound-waves had reached them, he had been legging it into the house.  The television had been on, and it had been acting as insanely as the screen on his right now.  He had called the State Police—­the telephones had been working all right—­and told them who he was, and they had told him to stay put and they’d send a car for him.  They did, within minutes.  Janet and his host and hostess had waited with him on the lawn until it came, and after he had gotten into it, he had turned around and looked back through the rear window, and seen Janet standing under the front light, holding the little dog in her arms, flopping one of its silly little paws up and down with her hand to wave goodbye to him.

He had seen her and the dog like that every day of his life for the last fifteen years.

“What kind of radiation are you getting?” he could hear Alexis Pitov asking into a phone.  “What?  Nothing else?  Oh; yes, of course.  But mostly cosmic.  That shouldn’t last long.”  He turned from the phone.  “A devil’s own dose of cosmic, and some gamma.  It was the cosmic radiation that put the radios and telescreens out.  That’s why I insisted that the drone planes be independent of radio control.”

They always got cosmic radiation from the micro-annihilations in the test-vault.  Well, now they had an idea of what produced natural cosmic rays.  There must be quite a bit of negamatter and posimatter going into mutual annihilation and total energy release through the Universe.

“Of course, there were no detectors set up in advance around Auburn,” he said.  “We didn’t really begin to find anything out for half an hour.  By that time, the cosmic radiation was over and we weren’t getting anything but gamma.”

“What—­What has Auburn to do—?” The Russian stopped short.  “You think this was the same thing?” He gave it a moment’s consideration.  “Lee, you’re crazy!  There wasn’t an atom of artificial negamatter in the world in 1969.  Nobody had made any before us.  We gave each other some scientific surprises, then, but nobody surprised both of us.  You and I, between us, knew everything that was going on in nuclear physics in the world.  And you know as well as I do—­”

A voice came out of the public-address speaker.  “Some of the radio equipment around the target area, that wasn’t knocked out by blast, is beginning to function again.  There is an increasingly heavy gamma radiation, but no more cosmic rays.  They were all prompt radiation from the annihilation; the gamma is secondary effect.  Wait a moment; Captain Urquiola, of the Air Force, says that the first drone plane is about to take off.”