For more than an hour the silent battle raged, during which time the Skylark flew millions upon millions of miles toward Earth. Finally the stranger spoke again.
“You three win,” it said abruptly. In answer to the unspoken surprise of all three men it went on: “Yes, all three of you got the same idea and Crane even forced his body to retain consciousness to fight me. Your efforts were very feeble, of course, but were enough to interrupt my calculations at a delicate stage, every time. You are a low form of life, undoubtedly, but with more mentality than I supposed at first. I could get that formula, of course, in spite of you, if I had time, but we are rapidly approaching the limits of my territory, outside of which even I could not think my way back. That is one thing in which your mechanical devices are superior to anything my own race developed before we became pure intellectuals. They point the way back to your Earth, which is so far away that even my mentality cannot grasp the meaning of the distance. I can understand the Earth, can visualize it from your minds, but I cannot project myself any nearer to it than we are at present. Before I leave you, I will say that you have conferred a real favor upon me—you have given me something to think about for thousands of cycles to come. Goodbye.”
Assured that their visitor had really gone, Seaton reduced the power to that of gravity and Dorothy soon sat up, Margaret reviving more slowly.
“Dick,” said Dorothy solemnly, “did that happen or have I been unconscious and just had a nightmare?”
“It happened, all right,” returned her lover, wiping his brow in relief. “See that pistol clamped upon the top of the board? That’s a token in remembrance of him.”
Dorothy, though she had been only half conscious, had heard the words of the stranger. As she looked at the faces of the men, white and drawn with the mental struggle, she realized what they had gone through, and she drew Seaton down into one of the seats, stroking his hair tenderly.
Margaret went to her room immediately, and as she did not return, Dorothy followed. She came back presently with a look of concern upon her face.
“This life is a little hard on Peggy. I didn’t realize how much harder for her it would be than it is for me until I went in there and found her crying. It is much harder for her, of course, since I am with you, Dick, and with you, Martin, whom I know so well. She must feel terribly alone.”
“Why should she?” demanded Seaton. “We think she’s some game little guy. Why, she’s one of the bunch! She must know that!”
“Well, it isn’t the same,” insisted Dorothy. “You be extra nice to her, Dick. But don’t you dare let her know I told you about the tears, or she’d eat me alive!”
Crane said nothing—a not unusual occurrence—but his face grew thoughtful and his manner, when Margaret appeared at mealtime, was more solicitous than usual and more than brotherly in its tenderness.
“I shall be an interstellar diplomat,” Dorothy whispered to Seaton as soon as they were alone. “Wasn’t that a beautiful bee I put upon Martin?”
Seaton stared at her a moment, then shook her gently before he took her into his arms.
The information, however, did not prevent him from calling to Crane a few minutes later, even though he was still deep in conversation with Margaret. Dorothy gave him an exasperated glance and walked away.
“I sure pulled a boner that time,” Seaton muttered as he plucked at his hair ruefully. “It nearly did us.
“Let’s test this stuff out and see if it’s X, Mart, while DuQuesne’s out of the way. If it is X, it’s some find!”
Seaton cut off a bit of metal with his knife, hammered it into a small piece of copper, and threw the copper into the power-chamber, out of contact with the plating. As the metal received the current the vessel started slightly.
“It is X! Mart, we’ve got enough of this stuff to supply three worlds!”
“Better put it away somewhere,” suggested Crane, and after the metal had been removed to Seaton’s cabin, the two men again sought a landing-place. Almost in their line of flight they saw a close cluster of stars, each emitting a peculiar greenish light which, in the spectroscope, revealed a blaze of copper lines.
“That’s our meat, Martin. We ought to be able to grab some copper in that system, where there’s so much of it that it colors their sunlight.”
“The copper is undoubtedly there, but it might be too dangerous to get so close to so many suns. We may have trouble getting away.”
“Well, our copper’s getting horribly low. We’ve got to find some pretty quick, somewhere, or else walk back home, and there’s our best chance. We’ll feel our way along. If it gets too strong, we’ll beat it.”
When they had approached so close that the suns were great stars widely spaced in the heavens, Crane relinquished the controls to Seaton.
“If you will take the lever awhile, Dick, Margaret and I will go downstairs and see if we can locate a planet.”
After a glance through the telescope, Crane knew that they were still too far from the group of suns to place any planet with certainty, and began taking notes. His mind was not upon his work, however, but was completely filled with thoughts of the girl at his side. The intervals between his comments became longer and longer until they were standing in silence, both staring with unseeing eyes out into the trackless void. But it was in no sense their usual companionable silence. Crane was fighting back the words he longed to say.
