As one of the Guardian ships protecting Earth, the crew had a problem to solve. Just how do you protect a race from an enemy who can take over a man's mind without seeming effort or warning?
You can see it--you can watch it--but mustn't touch!" And what could possibly be more frustrating. when you need, most violently, to get your hands on it for just one second....
The long-suffering public went along with billboards and singing commercials; they tolerated half a dozen sales pitches in a half-hour radio or TV show; they suffered stoically through the "hard-sell" and the "soft-sell." But when the hucksters turned the wild blue yonder into a vast television screen, they howled.
Lee Richardson and Alexis Pitov, two nuclear scientists, are participating in a thermonuclear test involving a rocket and negamatter. The test is decidedly not a test to develop into weapons-grade materials. However, Pitov and Richardson cannot help but consider the fate of Auburn, NY fifteen years ago when the nuclear event shocked the world. It had to be the Soviets. But the Soviets thought it was the Americans. Maybe it was the Australians? This new experimental test provides the answer.