The Skylark of Space - E. E. Smith (e book reading free txt) 📗

and even the Secret Service itself, under cover, and all that any of us has been able to get is an occasional small fish. We could never land the big fellows. In fact, we have never found the slightest material proof of what we are morally certain is the truth, that World Steel is back of a lot of deviltry all over the country. The little fellows who do the work either don’t know anything or are afraid to tell. I’ll see if I can find out what they are doing with the stuff they stole, but I’m not even sure of doing that. You can’t plant instruments on that bunch⁠—it would be like trying to stick a pin into a sleeping cat without waking him up. They undoubtedly have one of the best corps of detectives in the world. You haven’t perfected an instrument which enables you to see into a closed room and hear what is going on there, have you?” And upon being assured that they had not, he took his leave.

“Optimistic cuss, ain’t he?” remarked Seaton.

“He has cause to be, Dick. World Steel is a soulless corporation if there ever was one. They have the shrewdest lawyers in the country, and they get away legally with things that are flagrantly illegal, such as freezing out competitors, stealing patents, and the like. Report has it that they do not stop at arson, treason, or murder to attain their ends, but as Prescott said, they never leave any legal proof behind them.”

“Well, we should fret, anyway. Of course, a monopoly is what they’re after, but they can’t form one because they can’t possibly get the rest of our solution. Even if they should get it, we can get more. It won’t be as easy as this last batch was, since the X was undoubtedly present in some particular lot of platinum in extraordinary quantities, but now that I know exactly what to look for, I can find more. So they can’t get their monopoly unless they kill us off⁠ ⁠…”

“Exactly. Go on, I see you are getting the idea. If we should both conveniently die, they could get the solution from the company, and have the monopoly, since no one else can handle it.”

“But they couldn’t get away with it, Mart⁠—never in a thousand years, even if they wanted to. Of course I am small fry, but you are too big a man for even Steel to do away with. It can’t be done.”

“I am not so sure of that. Airplane accidents are numerous, and I am an aviator. Also, has it ever occurred to you that the heavy forging for the Skylark, ordered a while ago, are of steel?”

Seaton paused, dumbfounded, in the act of lighting his pipe.

“But thanks to your object-compass, we are warned.” Crane continued, evenly. “Those forgings are going through the most complete set of tests known to the industry, and if they go into the Skylark at all it will be after I am thoroughly convinced that they will not give way on our first trip into space. But we can do nothing until the steel arrives, and with the guard Prescott has here now we are safe enough. Luckily, the enemy knows nothing of the object-compass or the X-plosive, and we must keep them in ignorance. Hereinafter, not even the guards get a look at anything we do.”

“They sure don’t. Let’s get busy!”

DuQuesne and Brookings met in conference in a private room of the Perkins Café.

“What’s the good word, Doctor?”

“So-so,” replied the scientist. “The stuff is all they said it was, but we haven’t enough of it to build much of a power-plant. We can’t go ahead with it, anyway, as long as Seaton and Crane have nearly all their original solution.”

“No, we can’t. We must find a way of getting it. I see now that we should have done as you suggested, and taken it before they had warning and put it out of our reach.”

“There’s no use holding postmortems. We’ve got to get it, some way, and everybody that knows anything about that new metal, how to get it or how to handle it, must die. At first, it would have been enough to kill Seaton. Now, however, there is no doubt that Crane knows all about it, and he probably has left complete instructions in case he gets killed in an accident⁠—he’s the kind that would. We will have to keep our eyes open and wipe out those instructions and anyone who has seen them. You see that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I am afraid that is the only way out. We must have the monopoly, and anyone who might be able to interfere with it must be removed. How has your search for more X prospered?”

“About as well as I expected. We bought up all the platinum wastes we could get, and reworked all the metallic platinum and allied metals we could buy in the open market, and got less than a gram of X out of the whole lot. It’s scarcer than radium. Seaton’s finding so much of it at once was an accident, pure and simple⁠—it couldn’t happen once in a million years.”

“Well, have you any suggestions as to how we can get that solution?”

“No. I haven’t thought of anything but that very thing ever since I found that they had hidden it, and I can’t yet see any good way of getting it. My forte is direct action and that fails in this case, since no amount of force or torture could make Crane reveal the hiding-place of the solution. It’s probably in the safest safe-deposit vault in the country. He wouldn’t carry the key on him, probably wouldn’t have it in the house. Killing Seaton or Crane, or both of them, is easy enough, but it probably wouldn’t get us the solution, as I have no doubt that Crane has provided for everything.”

“Probably he has. But if he should disappear the stuff would have to