Chapter 21

“And you kept giving Hardy wrong information?” asked Strong with a laugh.

“Yes!” snorted Professor Sykes with a wry grin. “You see, I knew right away Vidac was doing something funny way back--” He paused to sip his tea. “Way back before we landed on Roald.” He grinned broadly at the people seated around the table in the dining room of the Logan house, Roger, Astro, Jeff, Tom, Jane, Billy, Hyram, and Strong.

After Strong had released the Space Cadets from the effects of the paralo rays, they had searched the Polaris and found the professor locked in one of the cabins. Placing Vidac and Hardy under arrest and confining them in the brig of the ship with Winters and Bush, they had returned to the Logan farm to clear a few of the mysteries surrounding the nightmare of violence since their landing on Roald.

“When Vidac and Hardy refused to let me go down and make an inspection of the satellite after the instruments conked out, I knew there was something fishy,” Sykes continued. “Any fool could have seen that radioactivity would be the only thing to cause an instrument disturbance like that!”

“Then Vidac and Hardy knew about the uranium?” asked Strong. “We only discovered it at Space Academy ourselves a little while ago.”

“They knew about it all right,” asserted Sykes. “Hardy told me so himself. He got the information from an old prospector who had made application to come to Roald as a colonist. The space rat had been here before, as a sailor on a deep spacer that had wandered off course. The ship was running low on water so the skipper sent him down to the satellite to see if he could find any. He found the water and the uranium too. But he clammed up about that, hoping to keep it a secret until he could go back and claim it. His only chance was to become a colonist, and when he washed out in the screening, he told Hardy, hoping to bribe his way. Of course Hardy double-crossed him to get the uranium himself. That was why you were pulled off the project and sent to Pluto, Strong. Then he got Vidac to be his aide and everything looked rosy.”

“It’s still hard to believe that Hardy was behind the whole operation,” said Astro, shaking his head. “Imagine--the governor of the colony ratting on his own people.”

“It’s happened before, unfortunately,” commented Strong. “Better men than Hardy have succumbed to the lure of riches and power.”

“You’re right, Strong,” snapped Sykes. “That’s just what happened to Hardy. While I was his prisoner on the Polaris, he kept boasting about how rich he was going to be--how powerful. When I reminded him of his past achievements and of his responsibility to the colony, he just laughed. He said getting the uranium meant more to him than anything in the world.” The little professor sighed. “If it hadn’t been for the cadets, he would have gotten away with it.”

“But wait a minute,” said Roger. “If you suspected Vidac, why did you give him the information on the uranium to send back to the Solar Guard?”

“I just told him about a puny little deposit near the Logan farm,” replied Sykes. “The big strike is on the other side of the satellite. I figured that if Vidac was honest it wouldn’t hurt to delay sending information back about the big strike until later.” He paused and added, “But then, of course, I had to tell him about the big strike.”

“You had to tell him!” exclaimed Jeff. “But why?”

“To stay alive, you idiot!” barked Sykes. “As long as I had something they wanted, they’d keep me alive until they found out about it. They gave me truth serum, but I’m immune to drugs. All Solar Guard scientists are. They didn’t know that. So I told them to look here, then there, acted as though I had lost my memory. It worked, and here I am.”