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But Soames rose and dressed with many forebodings. Fran would not meet him. Soames had given warning of traps and close hunting. But Fran would not meet him. It looked bad. He bought a second-hand motorcycle at ten o'clock in the morning. He knew motorcycles. By three in the afternoon he threaded through the traffic of Bluevale.
The Navajo Dam generated almost as much electric power as Niagara. "I had a hunch," said the security officer with some grimness, "the kid got past three electric fences, and we don't know how. He must know plenty about electricity. So I began to wonder if he might be hoping to answer that broadcast signal with a signal of his own. He was in Bluevale. We checked up.
At midnight Soames got his motorcycle out of the woods and onto the highway. He rode slowly back toward Bluevale. He stopped at a hot-dog stand outside the town and waited there for another signal. At one, nothing had happened. Soames was close enough to the town to have heard any tumult, certainly any shots. At two and three nothing.
A roofer lost some sheet copper a couple of days ago. Somebody broke in a storehouse and got away with forty or fifty feet of heavy-gauge copper wire. A man'd have stolen the whole roll. It would be only a kid that'd break off as much as he could carry. See? "He's getting set to make something, and we know he's near Bluevale. He'll need tools.
I've got Bluevale crammed with cops and plainclothesmen. That whole town is one big trap for that kid right now. And the cops will shoot! Because we don't know what that kid will make. If those kids had something that'll read your mind, made by grownups, maybe he'll make something that'll burn it out! He looks human, but he came out of space from Godknowswhere. Maybe he'll make deathrays!"
We got every town in five hundred miles to check up. Bread-truck drivers asked grocery stores. Any bread missing? Milk-men asked their customers. Has anybody been pinching your milk? We found where he was, in Bluevale, close to the Navajo Dam, you know. We set cops to watch. Almost got him yesterday morning. He was after a loaf of bread. A cop fired five shots at him, but he got away.
Dropped the loaf of bread, too." Soames wanted to be sick. Fran was possibly fourteen years old and desperate because his whole civilization depended on him to save them from the destruction falling out of the sky. He was a fugitive on a strange world. Then Soames' mouth went dry as he realized. Fran had been shot at in Bluevale, which was near the Navajo Dam.
He rode casually through Bluevale and along the wide, smooth highway to the much smaller village of Navajo Dam at the edge of the big lake the dam had backed up behind it and then at a leisurely pace along the same highway as it went over the crest of that massive structure. The lake to his right rose within feet of the highway.
He gave the motorcycle all the gas it would take and went racketing up the truck-road from the chasm below the dam. He made it. The motorcycle, its lights turned off, was across the dam and streaking for the first curve beyond before the flickerings of car headlights began to show on the road from Bluevale. Fran held on fiercely. But presently Soames felt the quiverings behind him.
At four o'clock, without warning, there was a flash of intolerably vivid blue-green light. It came from the chasm below the Navajo Dam. The lights across the dam's curving crest went out. The street-lights of Bluevale and the little village of Navajo Dam went out. The world went dark, while a mountainous blue-green flame shed intolerably bright light toward the stars. It went out, too.
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