'I won't tell your wife that,' the general interjected.

Bradley grinned, as if appreciating the joke, but inwardly burned

with the guilt he'd been trying to keep at bay ever since his single

meeting with Gladys Kinder.

The proprietor of the Roswell Daily Record had put him in touch

with her. They'd met in the bar of Bradley's hotel, and he'd been

instantly intrigued by her air of worldly cynicism. In the course of a

conversation about G.o.ddard's rocket team, he'd become

uncomfortably attracted to her. Clearly realizing what was happening

Gladys had pa.s.sed a few mischievous remarks to that effect and

actually managed to make him blush.

She was tall and lean and had a head of short-cropped brown hair,

which made her seem slightly mannish, and gray eyes that were

disconcertingly steady over a full-lipped, sardonic smile. She had been

wearing a long, belted dress, with high-heeled boots and a Stetson hat.

He, in his gray suit, portly and not too tall, in his late-thirties and

starting to show it (though thankfully he still had his hair) had felt soft

and pampered in her attractively laconic presence.

You didn't meet women like that in New York and besides, he

just liked her.

Now, when he recalled Gladys Kinder and also thought of his

attractive, good-humoured wife, Joan, who lovingly looked after their

home and children in Connecticut, he felt as guilty as if he'd had an

affair, which he certainly had not done. He had simply been tempted,

that's all... So why should he feel guilty?

'The woman, Gladys Kinder,' he continued uneasily, 'is a journalist

for one of the local papers, the Rosewell Daily Record. When I told her

I'd spent the past week checking up on G.o.ddard and his old launching

grounds in Eden Valley, she told me that two years ago she'd had an

affair with another physicist who'd stayed with G.o.ddard for six

months, spent most of that time working and sleeping in G.o.ddard's

machine shop, and was considered by most of G.o.ddard's men to have

been very influential on G.o.ddard's work. Those facts were later