The hell with it; he'd worry about all that later. The attack was due any minute, now, and there would be fleeing Commies coming up the valley ahead, of the UN advance. He'd better get himself placed before they started coming in on him.
He stopped thinking about the multiple mystery, a solution to which seemed to dance maddeningly just out of his mental reach, and found himself a place among the rocks to wait, and while he waited, he looked over the plastileather-bound notebook. In civil life, he had been a high school chemistry teacher, but the stuff in this book was utterly new to him. Some of it he could understand readily enough; the rest of it he could dig out for himself. Stuff about some kind of a carbonated soft-drink, and about a couple of unbelievable-looking long-chain molecules....
After a while, fugitive Communists began coming up the valley to make their stand.
Benson put away the notebook, picked up his carbine, and cuddled the stock to his cheek....
+--------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Transcriber's Note | | | | Bold text was surrounded by '+' symbols. | | | | One "onionskin" was converted to "onion-skin" to conform | | with the majority usage in the text. | | | | "rebuilds" and "re-builds" were left alone as there was no | | predominant usage | | | | The following typos were corrected: | | | | benificence beneficence | | lethel lethal | | "See See | | tyranical tyrannical | | | | Subscripts | | | | Water was shown as H_{ 2}O, and | | Sulfuric acid as H_{ 2}SO_{ 4} | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hunter Patrol, by Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire