“Check.”
“I’ve bucked Steel before. They account for half my business, and for ninety-nine percent of my failures. The same thing goes for all the other agencies in town. The cops have hit them time after time with everything they’ve got, and simply bounced. So has the F.B.I. All any of us has been able to get is an occasional small fish.”
“You think it’s hopeless, then?”
“Not exactly. I’ll keep on working, on my own. I owe them something for killing my men, as well as for other favors they’ve done me in the past. But I don’t believe in holding out false hopes.”
“Optimistic cuss, ain’t he?” Seaton remarked as Prescott went out.
“He has cause to be, Dick. Report has it that they use murder, arson, and anything else useful in getting what they want; but they have not been caught yet.”
“Well, now that we know, we’re in the clear. They can’t possibly get a monopoly—”
“No? You are getting the point. If we should both happen to die—accidentally, of course—then what?”
“They couldn’t get away with it, Mart; you’re too big. I’m small fry, but you are M. Reynolds Crane.”
“No good, Dick; no good at all. Jets still crash; and so, occasionally, do egg-beaters. Worse—it does not seem to have occurred to you that World Steel is making the heavy forgings and plates for the Skylark.”
“Hades’—brazen—bells!” Seaton was dumbfounded. “And what—if anything—can we do about that?”
“Very little, until all the parts get here, beyond investigating independent sources of supply.”
DuQuesne and Brookings met in the Perkins Café.
“How did your independent engineers like the power-plant?”
“The report was very favorable, doctor. The stuff is all you said it was. But until we get the rest of the solution—by the way, how is the search for more X progressing?”
“Just as I told you it would—flat zero. X can’t exist naturally on any planet having any significant amount of copper. Either the copper will go or the planet will, or both. Seaton’s X was meteoric. It was all in one lot of platinum; and probably that one X meteor was all there ever was. However, the boys are still looking, just in case.”
“Well, we’d have to get Seaton’s, some day, anyway. Have you decided how to get it?”
“No. That solution is in the safest safe-deposit vault in the world, probably in Crane’s name, and both keys to that box are in another one, and so on, ad infinitum. He’s got to get it himself, and willingly. Nor that it’d be any easier to force Seaton; but can you imagine anything strong enough to make M. Reynolds cave in now?”
“I can’t say that I can . . . no. But you remarked once that your forte is direct action. How about tacking with Perkins . . . no, he flopped on three tries.”
“Yes, call him in. It’s on execution he’s weak, not planning. I’m not.”
Perkins was called in, and studied the problem for many minutes. Finally he said, “There’s only one way. We’ll have to get a handle. . . .”
“Don’t be a fool !” DuQuesne snapped. You can’t get a thing on either of them—not even a frame!”
“You misunderstand, doctor. You can get a handle on any man living, if you know enough about him. Not necessarily in his past; present or future is oftentimes better. Money . . . power . . . position . . . fame . . . women—have you considered women in this case?”
“Women, bah!” DuQuesne snorted. “Crane’s been chased so long he’s woman-proof, and Seaton is worse. He’s engaged to Dorothy Vaneman, so he’s stone blind.”
“Better and better. There’s your perfect handle, gentlemen; not only to the solution, but to everything else you want after Seaton and Crane have been taken out of circulation.”
Brookings and DuQuesne looked at each other in perplexity. Then DuQuesne said, “All right, Perkins, after the way I popped off I’m perfectly willing to let you have a triumph. Draw us a sketch.”
“Build a spaceship from Seaton’s own plans and carry her off in it. Take her up out of sight—of course you’ll have to have plenty of witnesses that it was a spaceship and that it did go straight up out of sight—then hide her in one of our places—say with the Spencer girl—then tell Seaton and Crane she’s on Mars and will stay there till she rots if they don’t come across. They’ll wilt—and they wouldn’t dare take a story like that to the cops. Any holes in that?”
“Not that I can see at the moment. . . .” Brookings drummed his fingers abstractedly on the desk. “Would it make any difference if they chased us in their ship—in the condition it will be in?”
“Not a bit,” DuQuesne declared. “All the better—they’ll be gone, and in a wreck that will be so self-explanatory that nobody would think of making a metallurgical post-mortem.”
“That’s true. Who’s going to drive the ship?”
“I am.” DuOuesne said. “I’ll need help. though. One man from the inner circle. You or Perkins. Perkins, I’d say.”
“Is it safe?” Perkins asked.
“Absolutely. It’s worked out to the queen’s taste.”
“I’ll go along, then. Is that all?”
“No,” Brookings replied. “You mentioned Spencer. Haven’t you got that stuff away from her yet?”
“No, she’s stubborn as a mule.”
“Time’s running out. Take her along, and don’t bring her back. We’ll get the stuff back some other way.”
Perkins left the room; and after a long discussion of details, DuQuesne and Brookings left the restaurant, each by a different route.
Chapter 10
THE GREAT steel forgings which were to form the framework of the Skylark arrived and were hauled into the testing room, where radium-capsule X-raying revealed flaws in every member. Seaton, after mapping the imperfections by orthometric projection, spent an hour with calipers and slide rule.
“Strong enough to stand shipment and fabrication, and maybe a little to spare—perhaps one G of acceleration while we’re in the air. Any real shot of power, though, or any sudden turn, and pop! She collapses like a soap bubble. Want to recheck my figures?”
“No. I told you not to bother about analysis . We want sound metal, not junk.”
“Ship ’em back, then—with an inspector?”
“No.” At Seaton’s look of surprise, Crane went on. “I’ve been thinking about this possibility for a long time. If we reject these forgings, they will—immediately—try to kill us some other way; and they may very well succeed. On the other hand, if we go ahead all unsuspectingly and use them, they will let us alone until the Skylark is done. That will give us months of free, undisturbed time. Expensive time, I grant; but worth every dollar.”
“Maybe so. As the money man, you’re the judge of that. But we can’t fly a heap of scrap, Mart!”
“No, but while we are going ahead with this just as though we meant it, we can build another one, about four times its size, in complete secrecy.”
“Mart! You’re talking like a man with a paper nose! How d’you figure on keeping stuff that size secret from Steel?”
“It can be done. I know a chap who owns a steel mill—so insignificant, relatively speaking, that he has not been bought out or frozen out by Steel. I have helped him out from time to time, and he assures me that he will be glad to cooperate. We will not be able to oversee much of the work ourselves, which is a drawback. However, we can get MacDougall to do it for us.”
“MacDougall? The man who built Intercontinental? He wouldn’t touch a little job like this with a pole!”
“On the contrary, he is keen on doing it. It means building the first spaceship, you know.”
“He’s too big to disappear, I’d think. Wouldn’t Steel follow him up?”
“They never have, a few times when he and I have been out of touch with civilization for three months at a time.”
“Well, it would cost more than our whole capital.”
“No more talk of money, Dick. Your contribution to the firm is worth more than anything I have.”
“Hokay—if that’s the way you want it, it tickles me like I’d swallowed an ostrich feather . . . and I can’t think of any more objections. Four times the size—wheeeeekity-wheek ! A two-hundred-pound bar—k-z-r-e-e-p-t-POWIE!
“And why don’t we build an attractor—a thing like an object-compass except with a ten-pound bar instead of a needle, so if anything chases us in space we can reach out and shake the whey out of it—or machine guns shooting Mark Ones-to-Tens through the pressure gaskets in the walls? I just bodaciously do NOT relish the prospect of fleeing from a gaggle of semi-intelligent alien monstrosities merely because I got nothing bigger than a rifle to fight back with.”
“All you have to do is design them, Dick; and that shouldn’t be too hard. But, speaking of emergencies, the power plant should really have a very large factor of safety. Four hundred pounds, say, and everything in duplicate, from power-bars to push-buttons?”