my head; you'll never get them from me.'
'It really doesn't matter, Doctor,' returned Hardy negligently. 'My engineers can reconstruct them from what we have.'
'I doubt that very much! The chances are one in a million of your ever stumbling on certain facts that I did. I warn you—Independent Fourteen's lost for good if you do not turn me loose.'
'That may be,' smiled Hartly. Suddenly he burst into laughter. 'But surely you didn't think we were going to operate your device. It would cripple our economy if we worked it to one percent of its capacity. That machine of yours is impossible—now. We may use it for certain purposes which we shall decide, but your program of operation was a joke.'
Train and Ann looked at each other. 'I think, Barney,' she said softly,
'that sooner or later we'll kill this little man.'
'Yes. We will because we'll have to. I'll be back, Ann—wait for me.'
'Captain,' broke in Hartly to the officer, 'here is a warrant of transportation signed by the Commissioner. It authorizes you to remove the prisoner to a suitable institution for indefinite detention. I think that had best be M- 15.'
Train had been hustled into a police car and rushed to the outskirts of the city. There his guard turned him over to another group in grey uniforms. He looked for insignia but found none. A policeman said to him, before driving off, 'These men don't talk and they don't expect prisoners to. Watch your step—good-bye.'
Train's first question as to who his guards were was met with a hammer-like blow in the face. Silently they shoved him into an armored car, as grey and blank as their uniforms, and all he knew was that they were driving over rough roads with innumerable twists and turns. At last the car stopped and they dragged him out.
He almost cried out in surprise—they were at a rocket-port. It was small and well hidden by surrounding trees and hills, but seemed complete. On the field was a rocket the like of which he had never seen.
Without windows save for a tiny pilot's port, comparatively bare of markings, and heavily armored, it loomed there as a colossal enigma.
His guards took his arms and walked him to the ship. Silently a port opened, making a runway with the ground, and other men in grey descended. They took Train and the single sheet of paper that was his doom and dragged him into the ship.
'Where—,' he asked abruptly, and a club descended on his head.
He opened his eyes with the feel of cold water on his forehead. An inverted face smiled at him. 'Feeling better?' it asked.
Train sat up. 'Yes, thanks. Now suppose you tell me where we are and what in hell's going to become of us.' He stared about him at their quarters; they were in a little room of metal plates with no door apparent.
'I think we're on a prison ship,' said his companion. 'They were apparently delaying it for your arrival. We should be taking off shortly.'
'Yes—but where are we going?'
'Didn't you know?' asked the other with pity in his eyes. 'This ship goes to M-15.'
'I never heard of it or him. What is it?'
'Not many know it by its official number,' said the other carefully and slowly, 'but rumors of its existence are current almost everywhere. It is a planetoid in a tight orbit between Mercury and Vulcan—an artificial planetoid.'
He smiled grimly. 'For eighty years, it has been in operation as a private prison for those who offend against World Research. Employees of the Syndicate who attempt to hold out work they have developed with the company's equipment make up one part of the prison rolls. Attempted violence against high officers also accounts for many of the inmates.'
Suddenly his eyes flashed and he drew himself up. 'And I am proud,'
he said, 'to be one of those.'
Train moistened his lips. 'Did you,' he asked hesitatingly, 'try to kill—'
'No, not kill. I am a chemist, and chemistry means mathematical logic.
If one can produce the effects of death without creating the state itself, the punishment is far less. I am only human, and so I dosed—a certain corporation official—with a compound which will leave him less than a mindless imbecile in a month.'
'Then I certainly belong here with you. If anything, I'm the greater criminal. You only stole the brains of one man; I tried to cripple the Syndicate entire.'
'A big job—a very big job! What did—'
His words were cut off by a shattering, mechanical roar that rattled them about in their little room like peas in a pod.
'Hold on!' shouted the man to Train above the noise, indicating the handgrips set in the floor. 'We're going up!'
They flattened themselves, clutched the metal rods. Train was sick to his stomach with the sudden explosive hops of the ship as it jerked itself from the ground, but soon its gait steadied and the sputtering rocket settled down to a monotonous roar.
He rose and balanced himself on the swaying door of their cell. 'Next stop,' he said grimly, 'M-15!'
2
Lawrence—Train's cellmate on the prison ship—stirred uneasily and nudged the other. 'What is it?'
'Listen to that exhaust. Either something's gone wrong or we're going to land. How many days have we been going?'
'They've fed us twenty-three times.'
'Probably two weeks in space. That should be about it. Do you feel the gravity?' Train rolled over. 'It's faint, but it's there. We must have landed already—the motion we feel is the ship shifting around on the landing field.'
As though in confirmation of his words, the door to their cell that had been closed for two long weeks snapped open to admit two of their captors. The grey-clad men gestured silently and the prisoners got to their feet. Neither dared to speak; Train remembered the blow that had been his last answer, and so did Lawrence. They walked slowly ahead of their guards to the exit-port of the ship, not daring to guess what they might see.
Train walked first through the door and gasped. He was under a mighty dome of ferro-glass construction, beyond which stars glittered coldly.
They must have landed on the night side of the artificial asteroid, for he could see the blazing corona of the sun eclipsed by the sphere on which he was standing. Fantastic prominences leaped out in the shapes of animals or mighty trees, changing and melting into one another with incredible slowness. It was hard to believe that each one of them must have been huge enough to swallow a thousand Jupiters at once, without a flicker.
A guard prodded him savagely in the back. He began walking, trying his muscles against the strange, heady lack of gravity, mincing along at a sedate pace. They were headed for a blocky concrete building.
The doors opened silently before them, and they marched down a short corridor into an office of conventionally Terrestrial pattern.
For the first time Train heard one of the guards speak. 'Last two, sir,'
he said to a uniformed man behind a desk.
'You may leave, officers,' said the man gently. They saluted and disappeared from the room. The man rose and, in a curiously soft voice, said: 'Please be seated.'
Train and Lawrence folded into comfortable chairs, eyed their captor uncertainly. Lawrence was the first to speak.
'Is there anything I can do for you?' he asked with flat incongruity.
'Yes,' said the man. 'May I have your names?'
'Train and Lawrence,' said the chemist. The man wrote in a book sunk flush with the desk. 'Thank you. And your reasons for commitment to M-15?'
