Chapter 5

Pine roots burned brightly in the fireplace, snapping and sizzling as the blaze caught and flamed on the resin. Deep in an easy chair, Greg Manning stretched his long legs out toward the fire and lifted his glass, squinting at the flames through the amber drink.

“There’s something that’s been worrying me a little,” he said. “I hadn’t told you about it because I figured it wasn’t as serious as it looked. Maybe it isn’t, but it looks funny.”

“What’s that?” asked Russ.

“The stock market,” replied Greg. “There’s something devilish funny going on there. I’ve lost about a billion dollars in the last two weeks.”

“A billion dollars?” gasped Russ.

Greg swirled the whiskey in his glass. “Don’t sound so horrified. The loss is all on paper. My stocks have gone down. Most of them cut in half. Some even less than that. Martian Irrigation is down to 75. I paid 185 for it. It’s worth 200.”

“You mean something has happened to the market?”

“Not to the market. If that was it, I wouldn’t worry. I’ve seen the market go up and down. That’s nothing to worry about. But the market, except for a slight depression, has behaved normally in these past two weeks. It almost looks as if somebody was out to get me.”

“Who’d want to and why?”

Greg sighed. “I wish I knew. I haven’t really lost a cent, of course. My shares can’t stay down for very long. The thing is that right now I can’t sell them even for what I paid for them. If I sold now I’d lose that billion. But as long as I don’t have to sell, the loss is merely on paper.”

He sipped at the drink and stared into the fire.

“If you don’t have to, what are you worrying about?” asked Russ.

“Couple of things. I put that stock up as collateral to get the cash to build the spaceship. At present prices, it will take more securities than I thought. If the prices continue to go down, I’ll have the bulk of my holdings tied up in the spaceship. I might even be forced to liquidate some of it and that would mean an actual loss.”

He hunched forward in the chair, stared at Russ.

“Another thing,” he said grimly, “is that I hate the idea of somebody singling me out as a target. As if they were going to make a financial example of me.”

“And it sounds as if someone has,” agreed Russ.

Greg leaned back again, drained his glass and set it down.

“It certainly does,” he said.

Outside, seen through the window beside the fireplace, the harvest moon was a shield of silver hung in the velvet of the sky. A lonesome wind moaned in the pines and under the eaves.

“I got a report from Belgium the other day,” said Greg. “The spaceship is coming along. It’ll be the biggest thing afloat in space.”

“The biggest and the toughest,” said Russ, and Greg nodded silent agreement.

The ship itself was being manufactured at the great Space Works in Belgium, but other parts of it, apparatus, engines, gadgets of every description, were being manufactured at other widely scattered points. Anyone wondering what kind of ship the finished product would be would have a hard time gathering the correct information, which, of course, was the idea. The “anyone” they were guarding against was Spencer Chambers.

“We need a better television set,” said Russ. “This one we have is all right, but we need the best there is. I wonder if Wilson could get us one in Frisco and bring it back.”

“I don’t see why not,” said Greg. “Send him a radio.”

Russ stepped to the phone, called the spaceport and filed the message.

“He always stays at the Greater Martian,” he told Greg. “We’ll probably catch him there.”

Two hours later the phone rang. It was the spaceport.

“That message you sent to Wilson,” said the voice of the operator, “can’t be delivered. Wilson isn’t at the Greater Martian. The clerk said he checked out for New York last night.”

“Didn’t he leave a forwarding address?” asked Russ.

“Apparently not.”

Russ hung up the receiver, frowning. “Wilson is in New York.”

Greg looked up from a sheet of calculations.

“New York, eh?” he said and then went back to work, but a moment later he straightened from his work. “What would Wilson be doing in New York?”

“I wonder...” Russ stopped and shook his head.

“Exactly,” said Greg. He glanced out of the window, considering, the muscles in his cheeks knotting. “Russ, we both are thinking the same thing.”

“I hate to think it,” said Russ evenly. “I hate to think such a thing about a man.”

“One way to find out,” declared Greg. He rose from the chair and walked to the television control board, snapped the switch. Russ took a chair beside him. On the screen the mountains danced weirdly as the set rocketed swiftly away and then came the glint of red and yellow desert. Blackness blanked out the screen as the set plunged into the ground, passing through the curvature of the Earth’s surface. The blackness passed and fields and farms were beneath them on the screen, a green and brown checkerboard with tiny white lines that were roads.

New York was in the screen now. Greg’s hand moved the control and the city rushed up at them, the spires speeding toward them like plunging spears. Down into the canyons plunged the set, down into the financial district with its beetling buildings that hemmed in the roaring traffic.

Grimly, surely, Greg drove his strange machine through New York. Through buildings, through shimmering planes, through men. Like an arrow the television set sped to its mark and then Greg’s hand snapped back the lever and in the screen was a building that covered four whole blocks. Above the entrance was the famous Solar System map and straddling the map were the gleaming golden letters: INTERPLANETARY BUILDING.

“Now we’ll see,” said Greg.

He heard the whistle of the breath in Russ’s nostrils as the television set began to move, saw the tight grip Russ had upon the chair arms.

The interior of the building showed on the screen as he drove the set through steel and stone, offices and corridors and brief glimpses of steel partitions, until it came to a door marked: SPENCER CHAMBERS, PRESIDENT.

Greg’s hand twisted the control slightly and the set went through the door, into the office of Spencer Chambers.

Four men were in the room--Chambers himself; Craven, the scientist; Arnold Grant, head of Interplanetary’s publicity department, and Harry Wilson!

Wilson’s voice came out of the screen, a frantic, almost terrified voice.

“I’ve told you all I know. I’m not a scientist. I’m a mechanic. I’ve told you what they’re doing. I can’t tell you how they do it.”

Arnold Grant leaned forward in his chair. His face was twisted in fury.

“There were plans, weren’t there?” he demanded. “There were equations and formulas. Why didn’t you bring us some of them?”

Spencer Chambers raised a hand from the desk, waved it toward Grant. “The man has told us all he knows. Obviously, he can’t be any more help to us.”

“You told him to go back and see if he couldn’t find something else, didn’t you?” asked Grant.

“Yes, I did,” Chambers told him. “But apparently he couldn’t find it.”

“I tried,” pleaded Wilson. Perspiration stood out on his forehead. The cigarette in his mouth was limp and dead. “One of them was always there. I never could get hold of any papers. I asked questions, but they were too busy to answer. And I couldn’t ask too much, because then they would have suspected me.”