That, of course, was only the beginning of it. Within two weeks the little plain that had once been a mountain was covered with multicolored plastic Quonset huts through which moved so many people of such world-shaking importance that four gossip columnists had to be flown in from New York and Los Angeles to handle the overflow. Generals and admirals abounded, offering careful and profound opinions freely; slim, dark, intense young men with impeccable dark civilian suits and carrying dark attaché cases held hurried, sotto voce conferences; reporters did Profiles of everybody. The weather held fair, the neighborhood abounded in divers kinds of nature: birdsong and waterfall, poplar and mountain daisy, which most of the visitors found quaint and novel, and a good time was being had by all.

In the midst of this activity floated the still shiny golden brick, unperturbed, apparently as oblivious of the melee it had attracted as it was of the immutable laws governing the motion of masses: the laws of inertia and reaction, and the law of universal gravitation.

Some interesting things had been discovered about the brick. It was, for instance, completely impervious to any known form of radiant energy; it neither absorbed nor radiated heat; electron microscopes found its surface, on the atomic level, still smooth, metallic and shiny, without gaps; it apparently had no molecular—or, even, atomic—structure to speak of; it would conduct neither electricity, heat, nor anything else; and it obeyed no physical laws whatever. Thus far nine neo-adamant points, sharpened to submicroscopic pointedness and under pressures ranging up to three hundred fifty thousand tons, had failed to make any scratches in its surface; and all had eventually cracked.

The major had recovered most of his old poise and undauntedness, although his eyes now seemed to face the future with some hint of trepidation, and he was assigned to Operation Gold Brick—as the Army had cleverly named it—in an advisory capacity. In fact it was he who gave voice to a notion that had been whispered about for several days. After the ninth neo-adamant point had split against the surface of the brick it was he who marched to the orange Quonset of General Pomeroy and said, “Sir, let’s try an H-bomb.”

So they H-bombed it.

***

There was some confusion during the four days while the crater was being filled in; but after that was done and new Quonsets were built the Operation was even more pleasant and roomy, since nine more mountains had been leveled by the bomb, and about twenty others had been fused into interesting colors and shapes. The birds and trees and suchlike had, of course, been obliterated; but they had been beginning to pall on the visitors anyway; and now the area had something of the look of a neo-Surrealist landscape, or a Japanese garden. The radiation had, of course, been absorbed by the usual means.