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"Well, Fred, what do you know?" Cleveland asked, as soon as greetings had been exchanged. "How do the various reports dovetail together? I know that you couldn't tell me anything on the wave, but there's no danger of eavesdroppers here." "You can't tell," Rodebush soberly replied. "We're just beginning to wake up to the fact that there are a lot of things we don't know anything about.
On the other hand, I gave Rodebush a lot of data, and if he and Lyman Cleveland can add it to their own stuff and get that super-ship of ours rebuilt in time, they'll be out here on the prowl; and they'll have what can give even Nerado plenty of argument. No use worrying about it, anyway.
Rodebush cut off his power, and through the deafening roar of tube-noise an almost inaudible voice made itself heard. " ... all the help you can give us. Samms Cleveland Rodebush anybody of Triplanetary who can hear me, listen!
Rodebush cut the communicator beam. "Does he mean it?" he demanded of Costigan. "It sounds reasonable, but...." "But fishy," broke in Cleveland. "Altogether too reasonable for a...." "Yes, he means it; every word of it," interrupted Costigan in turn. "That's the way they are. Reasonable, passionless.
Rodebush snapped into the transmitter. "Two to get from here to atmosphere, four from atmosphere down to the Hill, and three to cool off. Notify the full four-shift crew everybody we've picked out. Don't need anybody else. Ship, batteries, and armament are ready!" "Two minutes to atmosphere, and it took ten coming out? Think you can do it?"
Cleveland, eyes upon interferometer grating and spectrophotometer charts, fingers flying over calculator keys, grinned as he turned toward Rodebush. "Just as you thought, Skipper; an ultra-band pusher. Shall I give him a little pull?" "Not yet; let's feel him out a little before we force a close-up. We've got plenty of mass. See what he does when I put full push on the projectors."
He shut off the power, turned to Rodebush, and went on: "Nobody knows how fast this ultra-wave travels, but if it goes as fast as we did coming out it's certainly moving. I'll give him about thirty minutes, then shoot in another call." But in less than two minutes the care-ravaged face of their chief appeared sharp and clear upon their plates and his voice snapped curtly from the speaker.
We can't launch you again the tracks are gone but you handled her easily enough coming in?" "That was all my fault," Rodebush admitted. "I should have neutralized inertia first, but I had no idea that the fields would extend beyond the hull, nor that they wouldn't act simultaneously. We'll take her out on the projectors this time, though, the same as we brought her in she handles like a bicycle.
They must be gone, or else his ultra-beams energies of such unthinkable velocity of propagation that man's most sensitive instruments had never been able even to estimate it would have held the ship's transmitter in spite of any velocity attainable by any matter under any conceivable conditions. The ship must have been disintegrated as soon as Rodebush released his forces.
Rodebush waved his hand at the pilot and the purring whisper of the exhausts changed instantly to a deafening, continuous explosion. The men were pressed deeply into their shock-absorbing chairs as the Silver Sliver spun around her longitudinal axis and darted away from the Chicago with such a tremendous acceleration that the spherical warship seemed to be standing still in space.
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