approached it became impossible for the most powerful forces at Rovol’s command to
hold a projection upon the flying vessel. In order to communicate, Rovol had to send out
a transmitting and receiving projection.
As the distance grew still greater, DuQuesne had done the same thing. Now it was
becoming evident, by the wavering and fading of the signals, that even the two
projections, reaching out toward each other though they were, would soon be out of
touch, and DuQuesne sent out his last message:
“There is no use in trying to keep in communication any longer, as our beams are falling
apart fast. I am on negative acceleration now, of an amount calculated to bring us down
to maneuvering velocity at the point to which the inertia of Skylark Two would have
carried her, without power, at the time when we shall arrive there. Please keep a
listening post established out this way as far as you can, and I will try to reach it if I find
out anything. If I fail-good-by!”
“The poor, dumb cluck!” DuQuesne sneered as he shut off his sender and turned to
Loring. “That was so easy that it was a shame to take it, but we’re certainly set to go
now.”
“I’ll say so!” Loring agreed enthusiastically. “That was a nice touch, chief, telling him to
keep a lookout out here. He’ll do it with forces, of course, not in person; but at that it’ll
keep him from thinking about the Earth until you’re all set.”
“You’ve got the idea, Doll. If they had any suspicion at all that we were heading back for
the Earth they could block us yet, easily enough; but if we can get back inside the Solar
System before they smell a rat it will be too late for them to do anything.”
He rotated his ship through an angle of ninety degrees upon her longitudinal axis and
applied enough “downward” acceleration to swing her around in such an immense circle
that she would approach the galaxy from the side opposite to that from which she had
left it.
Then, during days that lengthened into weeks and months of dull and monotonous flight,
the two men occupied themselves, each in his own individual fashion. There was no
piloting to do and no need of vigilance, for space to a distance of untold billions of miles
was absolutely and utterly empty.
Loring, unemotional and incurious, performed what simple routine house-keeping there
was to do, ate, slept, and smoked. During the remainder of the time he simply sat still,
stolidly doing nothing whatever until the time should come when DuQuesne would tell him
to perform some specific act.
DuQuesne, on the other hand, dynamic and energetic to his ultimate fiber, found not a
single idle moment. His newly acquired knowledge was so vast that he needs must
explore and catalogue his own brain, to be sure that he would be able instantly to call
upon whatever infinitesimal portion of it might be needed in some emergency.
The fifth-order projector, with its almost infinitely complicated keyboard, must needs be
studied until its every possible resource of integration, permutation, and combination held
from him no more secrets than does his console from a master of the pipe organ. Thus it
was that the galaxy loomed ahead, a stupendous lens of flame, before DuQuesne had
really realized that the long voyage was almost over.
To his present mentality, working with his newly acquired fifth-order projector, the task of
locating our Solar System was but the work of a moment; and to the power and speed of
his new space ship the distance from the galaxy’s edge to the Earth was merely a
longish jaunt.
When they approached the Earth it appeared as a softly shining, greenish half moon.
With fleecy wisps of cloud obscuring its surface here and there, with gleaming ice caps
making of its poles two brilliant areas of white, it presented an arrestingly beautiful
spectacle indeed; but DuQuesne was not interested in beauty. Driving down from the
empty reaches of space north of the ecliptic, he observed that Washington was in the
morning zone, and soon his great vessel was poised motionless, invisibly high above the
city.
His first act was to throw out an ultra-powered detector screen, with automatic trips and
tighteners, around the entire Solar System; out far beyond the outermost point of the
orbit of Pluto. Its every part remained unresponsive. No foreign radiation was present in
all that vast volume of space, and DuQuesne turned to his henchman with cold satis-
faction stamped upon his every hard lineament.
“No interference at all, Doll. No ships, no projections, no spy rays, nothing,” he said. “I
can really get to work now. I won’t be needing you for a while, and I imagine that, after
being out in space so long, you would like to circulate around with the boys and girls for a
couple of weeks or so. How are you fixed for money?”
“Well, chief, I could do with a small binge and a few nights out among ’em, if it’s all right
with you,” Loring admitted. “As for money, I’ve got only a couple of hundred on me, but I
can get some at the office-we’re quite a few pay days behind, you know.”
“Never mind about going to the office. I don’t know exactly how well Brookings is going to
like some of the things I’m going to tell him, and you’re working for me, you know, not for
the office. I’ve got plenty. Here’s five thousand, and you can have three weeks to spend
it in. Three weeks from today I’ll tell you what to do. Until then, do as you please. Where
do you want me to set you down? Perhaps the Perkins roof will be clear at this hour.”
“Good as any. Thanks, chief,” and without even a glance to assure himself that
DuQuesne was at the controls Loring made his way through the manifold airlocks and
calmly stepped out into ten thousand feet of empty air.
DuQuesne caught the falling man neatly with an attractor and lowered him gently to the
now-deserted roof of the Perkins Café-that famous restaurant which had been planned
and was maintained by the World Steel Corporation as a blind for its underground
activities. He then seated himself at his console and drove his projection down into the
innermost private office of Steel. He did not at first thicken the pattern into visibility, but
remained invisible, studying Brookings, now president of that industrial octopus.
The magnate was seated as of yore in a comfortably padded chair at his massive and
ornate desk, the focus and center of a maze of secret private communication bands and
even more secret private wires. For Steel was a growing octopus and its voraciously
insatiable maw must be fed.
Brookings had but one motto, one tenet “get it.” By fair play at times, although this
method was employed but seldom; by bribery, corruption, and sabotage as the usual
thing; by murder, arson, mayhem, and all other known forms of foul play if necessary or
desirable-Steel GOT IT.
To be found out was the only sin, and that was usually only venial instead of cardinal; for
it was because of that sometimes unavoidable contingency that Steel not only retained
the shrewdest legal minds in the world, but also wielded subterranean forces sufficiently
powerful to sway even supposedly incorruptible courts of justice.
Occasionally, of course, the sin was cardinal; the transgression irremediable: the court
unreachable. In that case the octopus lost a very minor tentacle; but the men really guilty
had never been brought to book.
Into the center of this web, then, DuQuesne drove his projection and listened. For a
whole long week he kept at Brookings’ elbow, day and night. He listened and spied,
studied and planned, until his now gigantic mentality not only had grasped every detail of
everything that had developed during his long absence and of everything that was then
going on, but also had planned meticulously the course which he would pursue. Then, late
one afternoon, he cut in his audio and spoke.
“I knew of course that you would try to double-cross me, Brookings, but even I had no
idea that you would make such an utter fool of yourself as you have.”
As he heard the sneering, cutting tone of the scientist’s well-remembered voice, the
magnate seemed to shrink bodily, his face turning a pasty gray as the blood receded
from it.
“DuQuesne!” he gasped. “Where–are you?”
“I’m right beside you, and I have been for over a week.” DuQuesne thickened his image
to full visibility and grinned sardonically as the man at the desk reached hesitantly toward
a button. “Go ahead and push it-and see what happens. Surely even you are not dumb
enough to suppose that a man with my brain-even the brain I had when I left here would
take any chances with such a rat as you have always shown yourself to be?”