She shook her head. “I assure you it wasn’t!”
“So he could reach you from nonspace!” Harding said. “That was something we didn’t know. We suspected we still didn’t have the whole picture about the rogue. But he didn’t know everything either. He thought his escape route from the project and away through the conduit system was clear. It was a very bold move. If he’d reached any point on Earth where we weren’t waiting to destroy him from a distance, he would have needed only a minute or two with the projector to win all the way. Well, that failed. And a very short time later, we knew we had the rogue in the conduit.”
“How did you find that out?”
Harding said, “The duplicate global scanner I told you about. After all, the rogue could have been Weldon. Aside from you two, he could have been almost anyone involved in the operation. He might have been masquerading as one of our own telepaths! Every location point the diex field turned to during that `test run’ came under instant investigation. We were looking for occurrences which might indicate the rogue had been handling the diex projector.
“The first reports didn’t start to come in until after the Weldon imitation had taken the projector into the conduit. But then, in a few minutes, we had plenty! They showed the rogue had tested the projector, knew he could handle it, knew he’d reestablished himself as king of the world—and this time for good! And then he walked off into the conduit with his wonderful stolen weapon. . . .”
Arlene said, “He was trying to get Dr. Ben and me to open the project exit for him again. We couldn’t of course. I never imagined anyone could experience the terror he felt.”
“There was some reason for it,” Harding said. “Physical action is impossible in nonspace, so he couldn’t use the projector. He was helpless while he was in the conduit. And he knew we couldn’t compromise when we let him out.
“We switched the conduit exit to a point eight hundred feet above the surface of Cleaver Interplanetary Spaceport—the project he’s kept us from completing for the past twenty-odd years—and opened it there. We still weren’t completely certain, you know, that the rogue mightn’t turn out to be a genuine superman who would whisk himself away and out of our reach just before he hit the marblite paving.
“But he wasn’t. . . .”