PACKET II — LOOT

On the second bundle: three kinds of loot, and the warning owed a reader who came for the rogue.

Lake Forest, Illinois, the third Saturday of October, 1945: the author is married in the stone church the machine-tool money built, ten days after his discharge and thirteen before his ship.

Frankfurt and the American zone, November–December 1945: the author joins the collection apparatus later notorious as Paperclip and conducts his first gathering: a beaten engineer, a cold…

Lower Bavaria, January 1946: sent south to put the chief of the Peenemünde rocket men on Sennett's ledger, the author meets the best salesman he ever heard, himself included, and closes o…

The Harz, late winter of 1946 by the author's calendar: sent to move the professor's dowry west by rail out of country already drawn for the Russians, the author counts everything, signs …

Continued directly from the number preceding: at first light the author goes into the Kohnstein with a carbide lamp, a Reichsbahn yardmaster, and seven soldiers, to bring out the last hun…

Sent home by a routing he had not chosen, the author spends one night in the four-power capital and keeps, at last, the appointment he has carried folded in a valise since New Mexico.

Home from the plunder, the author spends his year and a half in the desert making Americans of the men he shipped, and closes the German business by walking it across a bridge in its best…

Ordered east from the desert, the author talks his way past the machine's doorkeeper on mesa credentials and finds his next congregation: two inventors on their way out of the building th…

Planted by his wife's money at the founding of the inventors' company, the author takes up the minute-book again and spends a year recording a business he does not understand, in rooms wh…

Spring 1947: ordered to Teddington to look, learn, and acquire, the author inspects the fastest computing machine in the world, which does not yet exist, and meets its designer, who is in…

Midsummer 1947: recalled from England by the Sennett wire, the author passes a fortnight in Lake Forest between errands and gives one number, this one, to the marriage as it stood.

Chicago, June 1948: the calculating-machinery concern acquired in the last number stages its demonstration at last, before the government's buyers and the press, and the author is made a …

Chicago, autumn 1949: on the twenty-third of September the President announces that an atomic explosion has occurred inside the Soviet Union, four years ahead of every official promise, a…

London, the first days of February 1950: the quietest man on the old post confesses, and the serious men with maps and timetables promised in the first bundle begin walking every mile his…

Chicago, June 1950: the hunters of the last number pause for the summer, the money arrives at last, and the author stages the most successful demonstration in the corporation's history, s…

Washington, the winter of 1950: the young man in the good hat returns with the paper he was measuring, and the author, called before the Congress on the atomic-security matter, pays at la…

New York, the night of November 4, 1952: television rents an electronic brain for the election, the machine calls the landslide at half past eight on three per cent of the vote, and the m…

The hunt that has walked backward out of New Mexico since 1950 reaches, in this number, the author's unaccounted Sunday, and he turns it aside by the means he has declined to name since 1…

Eleven months after the postcard that closed the last number, the author flies the corridor into the divided city, crosses a line already hardening, and keeps, in a cellar under new manag…

The board promised at the close of the last number convenes in this one, in the spring the generalissimo died, and puts to the author the question of the age; he answers it in the syllabl…