“No, my daughter . . . by no means . . . I still fail to see the connection. Will you explain, please?”
“Dick’s idea was to have Dunark take the first eight bars of copper and sail for Mardonale. Then we would take the next forty bars—which would take about half an hour to make—and leave immediately for Earth. Then, when Dunark arrived over Mardonale he would have been shot down out of control wouldn’t he?”
“Undoubtedly. . . . I understand now, but go ahead.”
“How long did it take the Mardonalian fleet to get here, about?”
“About forty of your hours.”
“Then, assuming that Dunark didn’t take any time at all in getting over there, we would have been gone about thirty-nine and a half hours when they struck . . . but there wasn’t that much time! They must have been well on the way while we were getting the copper!”
“Very true, daughter Margaret, but the end result would have been precisely the same. You would have been gone at least one hour—which, for us, would have been as bad as one thousand.”
The Karfedix Roban stood facing the party from Earth. Back of him stood his family, the officers and nobility, and a multitude of people.
“Is it permitted, karfedo, that I award your captive some small recognition of the service he has done my nation?” Roban asked.
“It is permitted,” Seaton and Crane replied, in unison; whereupon Roban stepped forward and, after handing DuQuesne a heavy bag, fastened about his left wrist the emblem of the Order of Kondal.
“I welcome you, Karfedelix DuQuesne, to the highest nobility of Kondal.”
He then clasped around Crane’s wrist a bracelet of ruby-red metal bearing a peculiarly wrought, heavily-jeweled disk, at the sight of which the nobles saluted and Seaton barely concealed a start of surprise.
“Karfedix Crane, I bestow upon you this symbol; which proclaims that, throughout all Kondalian Osnome, you have authority as my personal representative in all things, great and small.”
Approaching Seaton, Roban held up a bracelet of seven disks so that everyone could see it. The nobles knelt; the people prostrated themselves.
“Karfedix Seaton, no language spoken by man possesses words able to express our indebtedness to you. In small and partial recognition of that indebtedness I bestow upon you these symbols, which declare you to be our overlord, the ultimate authority upon all Osnome.”
Lifting both arms above his head he continued.
“May the great First Cause smile upon you in all your endeavors until you solve the Prime Mystery; may your descendants soon reach the Ultimate Goal. Good-bye.”
Seaton spoke a few heartfelt words in response and the five Earth-people stepped backward toward their ship. As they reached it the standing emperor and the ranks of nobles snapped into the double salute—truly a rare gesture.
“What’ll we do now?” Seaton whispered. “I’m fresh out of ideas.”
“Bow, of course,” Dorothy said.
They bowed, deeply and slowly, and entered their vessel; and as the Skylark shot into the air the grand fleet of Kondalian warships fired a royal salute.
Chapter 22
DUQUESNE’S first act upon gaining the privacy of his own cabin was to open the bag presented to him by the emperor. He expected to find it filled with rare metals, with perhaps some jewels, instead of which the only metal present was in a heavily insulated tube—a full half pound of metallic radium!
The least valuable items of his prize were hundred of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds of very large size and of flawless perfection. Merely ornamental glass to Roban, he had known their Earthly value. To this wealth of known gems Roban had added a rich and varied assortment of the strange jewels peculiar to his own world, the faidon alone being absent from the collection. DuQuesne’s calmness almost deserted him as he sorted out and listed the contents of the bag.
The radium alone was worth millions of dollars; and the scientist in him exulted at the uses to which it would be put, even while he was also exulting at the price he would get for it. He counted the familiar jewels, estimating their value as he did so—a staggering total. That left the strange gems, enough to fill the bag half full—shining and glowing and scintillating in mufti-colored splendor. He sorted them out and counted them, but made no effort to appraise them. He knew that he could get any price he pleased to set.
“Now,” he breathed to himself, “I can go my own way!”
The return voyage through space was uneventful. Several times, as the days wore on, the Skylark came within gravity range of gigantic suns; but her pilots had learned the most important fundamental safeguard of interstellar navigation. Automatic indicating and recording goniometers were now on watch continuously, set to give alarm at a deviation of two seconds of arc; and their dead reckoning of acceleration and velocity was checked, twice each eight-hour shift, by triangulation and the application of Schuyler’s Method.
When half the distance had been covered the bar was reversed, the travelers holding an impromptu ceremony as the Skylark spun through an angle of one hundred eighty degrees.
A few days later Seaton, who was on watch, thought he recognized Orion. It was by no means the constellation he had known, but it seemed to be shifting, ever so slowly, toward the old, familiar configuration. It was Orion!
“C’mere, everybody !” he shouted, and they came.
“That, my friends, is the most gladsome sight these feeble old eyes have rested on for many a long and weary moon. Wassail!”
They “wassailed” with glee, and from that moment on the pilot was never alone at his board. Everyone who could be there was there, looking over his shoulders to watch the firmament while it assumed a more and more familiar aspect.
They identified Sol; and, some time later, they could see Sol’s planets.
Crane put on all the magnification he had, and the girls peered excitedly at the familiar outlines of continent and oceans upon the lighted half of the visible disk.
It was not long until these outlines were plainly visible to the unaided vision, the Earth appearing as a softly shining, greenish half-moon, with parts of its surface obscured by fleecy wisps of cloud, with its ice-caps making of its poles two brilliant areas of white. The wanderers stared at their world with hearts in throats as Crane made certain that they would not be going too fast to land.
The girls went to prepare a meal and DuQuesne sat down beside Seaton.
“Have you gentlemen decided what you intend to do with me?”
“No. We haven’t discussed it yet, and I can’t make up my own mind—except that I’d like to have you in a square ring with four-ounce gloves. You’ve been of altogether too much real help on this trip for either of us to enjoy seeing you hanged. At the same time, you’re altogether too much of a scoundrel for us to let you go free. . . . I, personally, don’t like anything we can do, or not do, with you. That’s the fix I’m in. What would you suggest?”
“Nothing,” DuQuesne replied, calmly. “Since I am in no danger whatever of either hanging or prison, nothing you can say or do along those lines bothers me at all. Hold me or free me, as you please. I will add that, while I have made a fortune on this trip and do not have to associate any longer with Steel unless it is to my interest to do so, I may find it desirable at some future time to obtain a monopoly of X. If so, you and Crane, and possibly a few others, would die. No matter what happens or does not happen, however, this whole thing is over, as far as I’m concerned. Done with. Fini.”
“You kill us? You talk like a man with a paper nose. Peel off, buster, any time you like. We can outrun you, outjump you, throw you down, or lick you—hit harder, run faster, dive deeper, and come up dryer—for fun, money, chalk, or marbles . . . .”
A thought struck him and every trace of levity disappeared. Face hard and eyes cold, he stared at DuQuesne, who stared unmovedly back at him.
“But listen, DuQuesne,” Seaton said slowly, every word sharp, clear, and glacially cold. “That goes for Crane and me, personally. Nobody else. I could be arrested for what I think of you as a man; and if anything you ever do touches either Dorothy or Margaret in any way I’ll kill you like I would a snake—or rather, I’ll take you apart like I would any other piece of scientific apparatus. And don’t think this is a threat. It’s a promise. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly. Good night.”
For many hours Earth had been obscured by clouds, so that the pilot had no idea of what part of it was beneath them. To orient himself, Seaton dropped downward into the twilight zone until he could see the surface, finding that they were almost directly over the western end of the Panama Canal. Dropping still lower, to about ten thousand feet, he stopped and waited while Crane took bearings and calculated the course to Washington.