“You know, Tom, the peace and quiet of outer space is going to come as a welcome relief after the goings on around here,” Bud said to his pal as they stretched out in their beds. “Rotzog has tried about everything on us but germ warfare. Do you suppose we’d better start boiling our drinking water tomorrow?”
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“I wouldn’t put that past him, either,” Tom replied with a grim smile. “He’d resort to such tactics. But,” he added resolutely, “I don’t intend to give our enemies enough time to strike again.”
“Glad to hear that!” Bud gave a tremendous yawn and a minute later both boys were sound asleep.
As dawn broke, the blinker on Fearing Island’s short-wave system suddenly flashed on the black panel in the communications office. When no one answered, a buzzer sounded. George Billing leaped from his bunk in the next room to switch on the set.
The caller was Radnor, the security assistant, who, upon being released from the hospital, had gone to Washington to confer with the FBI and other authorities on the progress of the hunt for Rotzog and his rocket base.
“At last! At last!” came his excited but faraway voice. “I’m up in the Aleutians in a search plane. We’ve got news of Rotzog’s hide-out!”
“Go on!” Billing urged.
Radnor’s voice was not coming through clearly. It would fade, strengthen, and fade again. Billing strained his ears to put the message together.
“We’re on our way to check on a report a fisherman brought in a few minutes ago,” the agent continued. “The man tells us that he saw a giant rocket on a lonely island five days ago. It’s taken him all this time to get the news to us by boat. Almost a thousand miles of open sea.”