"I know, Rog," the man said, aware of a rising flood of self-condemnation. "Go on, son. About the rocket. What kind of fuel did you use?"

"Oh, nothing special. It had a liquid bi-propellant motor. We used ethanol and liquid oxygen. Pretty old-fashioned. But we didn't know how to get hold of the fancier stuff, and didn't have any way of synthesizing it. Then, at the last minute, we found that one of the valves feeding into the nozzle was clogged up. That's why we were late to cla.s.s."

"Couldn't that have been dangerous?" Duran asked, and realized at once that he had said the wrong thing.

The boy merely shrugged.

"Well, it must have been a pretty good machine if it flew sixty miles and hit its target," Duran went on.

"Oh, we had it radio-controlled, with a midget T.V. transmitter mounted in it. Gra.s.so took care of that. He did a terrific job. Of course, it was pretty expensive."

He glanced at his father tentatively for a moment, then bent his gaze to the cigarette.

"I don't have my car any more. But I guess I won't be needing it now."

There was a cautious knock on the door.

"Listen, Rog," Duran began, "I'll try to get to see you tomorrow before I leave. Remember that your mother and I are both on your side, without qualification. You've done a pretty terrible thing, of course.

But I have to admit, at the same time, that I'm really rather proud of you. Does that make sense?"

"Sure," said Roger huskily, "I guess so."

The flight home was a quiet one. Duran found himself with many thoughts to think, not the least of which was what his wife's reaction would be. The difficulty lay in the fact that their married life had been too easy, too free of tragedy, to enable him to foresee her response. But life would not be quite the same now, even if Roger escaped the more concrete forms of punishment. And perhaps it would be the most difficult for Ernest, who would forever be expected either to live up to or down to his older brother's reputation. When all poor Ernest seemed to want these days was to play the saxophone.

And then there was his own political future to consider. This would certainly not help it. But perhaps the affair would be forgotten in the next three years. After all, it might have been far worse. It might have happened in a campaign year. This way he still had a fighting chance. Three sessions with a good record might overbalance the loss in public confidence this would incur. And then he thought of the Mars colony mess and winced.

Telling his wife about the matter was not nearly so difficult as the senator had feared. She had been ready for news of a crime of pa.s.sion, or at least of armed robbery. What her husband had to relate stunned her at first. But once she had ridden out the shock, she recovered quickly.

"You don't have to go tonight, Molly," Duran told her.

"You think it might look better if I didn't?" she asked gently.

"That wasn't what I was getting at," he said. He thought it over for a moment, then added, "No, I don't. In fact, I think it would look better if we both went to the Governor's. Roger is not a juvenile delinquent. That, I believe, is understood. If we must accept some of the responsibility for what he did today, then let's do so gracefully.

Were you to stay home tonight, it might appear to some that you had reason to be ashamed of the business, which you don't."

"It might also look as if I were afraid that Ernest might do something similar, as if I felt I had to watch him," she said. "Oh, people can be so ridiculous! Why wasn't Millie Gorton's boy in on it?"

Duran smiled at the idea of the Governor's tubby, obtuse son involved in the construction of anything more demanding than a paper glider.

The Governor's mansion, a century old edifice typifying the moribund tendency to confuse dignity with discomfort, was teeming with professional and political personages when the Durans arrived. The dinner went off routinely, with no overt references made to the missile matter. However, the senator noticed that no one inquired into the health and happiness of his two sons, so that he presumed word had got around.

It was not until after dinner, when he had seated himself alone in a corner of the luxurious old living room, a B and B in one hand and a cigar in the other, that his host approached him.

"Evenin', Vance. Sure glad you could make it," exclaimed the familiarly jovial voice of Governor Will Gorton.

Duran sat down his drink and took the Governor's plump hand, shaking it vigorously. Then the senator observed the intense youngish face of Fritz Ambly, who had followed the Governor.

"Guess you know Fritz," Gorton went on, seating himself next to Duran.

"Says he met you at Sig's office this afternoon."

"That's right," Duran said. "Good to see you again, Ambly."

The Youth Welfare board chairman nodded affably and took the remaining chair. His look of concern had mellowed somewhat with the evening. But the pale close eyes remained set in an expression of aggressive earnestness.

"How's Roger?" Gorton asked, after a moment's silence.

"As normal as ever," said Duran, unprepared for the question. Then, slyly, he added, "Thanks for talking Loeffler into letting me see him."

"Well, Sig agreed it was the only thing to do, after I told him you'd be leaving for Washington again tomorrow," the Governor said.

Duran grinned wryly. It had been a guess, but a good one. And Loeffler's having pa.s.sed the interview off as a personal favor put their relationship back in its proper perspective.

"Well, what's to be done about the boys? They're all under eighteen, I suppose."

"That's right," Gorton said. "It's entirely a matter for the juvenile authority. At least we're going to try to keep it there. But there's more to it than that. Which is why Fritz is here. He has something on his mind which he thinks is pretty important. I do too."

"You see, Senator," said Ambly, coming in promptly on his cue, "it's this way. If the case were an isolated one, it would be easy enough for us to deal with. But it's part of a pattern which few people have yet noticed. Let me cite several other similar incidents.

"Perhaps you read about the group of fifty teen-aged copter jockeys who decided to hold a transcontinental scavenger hunt. Ignoring all air-traffic regulations, they managed to run up the magnificent total of seventeen collisions and thirty-two casualties."

"Hear about that one, Vance?" the Governor asked, his earlier festiveness gone.

"Yes, I think I saw something about it," Duran said. "It was pretty unfortunate, but--"

"And then there was the case of the promising young New England biologist who was discovered to have evolved a particularly deadly strain of bacteria, which he had been toting around with him in an aspirin bottle," Ambly went on, his thin hands clasped tightly in front of him. "Of course, at the age of sixteen, one perhaps can't be expected to foresee all of the possible consequences.

"So let us consider the two seventeen-year-olds who caused something of a sensation in Florida when they used the Branski-Baker method of genetic exchange to breed a quite fabulous species of winged alligator. Several of these so called 'alli-bats' escaped into the everglades, but it is doubted that they will be able to reproduce themselves. At least there is _some_ doubt."

The senator reached for his drink and sipped it thoughtfully. He was beginning to see Roger's gang's misadventure in a new light. But it was an unfamiliar light, one that would take him a while to become accustomed to.

"Perhaps the most startling case of all," Ambly went on, "concerns the Nuclear Fission Society of Urania, Nevada. It is not a well publicized fact that this quasi-academic group of adolescent physicists was exposed in the act of a.s.sembling an elementary but workable atomic bomb. Many of the elders in this fast-growing little community are engaged, as you no doubt know, in atomic development of one sort or another. It seemed that this interest had trickled down to their offspring, who showed an impressive amount of ingenuity in getting the necessary materials. Fortunately, one youngster asked his father entirely too many questions concerning the actual fabrication of fission weapons. The man investigated and--"

"Now, wait a minute," Duran interrupted, wondering momentarily if the whole tale might not have been a hoax. "How much of this am I really expected to believe?"

"It's all fact, Vance," Governor Gorton responded solemnly. "Fritz has a couple of sc.r.a.pbooks I'd like you to look at some time. Each case is pretty well authenticated. But the important thing is the pattern.

It's really sort of frightening in a way."

"Many similar incidents have no doubt occurred of which I have no record," said Ambly. "I'd estimate that ninety percent of such cases are suppressed, either in the interest of national security or because the children's parents are sufficiently influential to have the story squelched."

"Just as we'd have sat on this one," added Gorton, "if the dang thing hadn't actually been shot off."

Duran smiled inwardly at the picture evoked by the Governor's metaphor. However, he had to admit that the press would in all probability not have learned about the rocket at all, had it been discovered prior to being launched.

"Still," he remarked, "it's odd that the papers haven't shown more of an interest in it."