Inky blackness endured for eons. Then it passed. With great effort Bennion opened his eyes. The control room was flooded with brilliant light. Looming big in the lefthand ports was the moon, scarcely twenty-five thousand miles away. Bennion feasted his sight on the sparkling surface, broken picturesquely, by mighty mountain ranges and huge craters. Then he found himself craning his neck to follow the view, for the moon was rapidly drawing aft. The Star of Hope was well launched into space, was already beyond the orbit of the moon.
Bennion adjusted the feed flow to the flaring tubes. It was not enough to get clear of the moon. He must make certain that contact would not be made with any other body in the solar system. He threw the propelling blasts sufficiently out of balance to ensure the rocket ship's twisting upward, straight-way out of the plane of the ecliptic. There was no more to do for the time being. Bennion walked to a port and gazed out at the multicolored stars that studded the heavens, now to be seen with magnificent clarity.
"Beautiful, isn't it, Steve?" said a soft voice behind him. Steve spun as if struck by a lash.
"You! Kitty! You shouldn't be here!"
"I am here. I couldn't let you do this thing alone. I — you — that is we — "
He dragged her to him in a grotesque embrace. Unhelmeted, but with bodies clad in heavy leaden suits, they must have appeared to an astonished man on the moon as a species of ungainly turtle, from some alien planet.
"I thought you were safe — on your way down south," he said.
"That is what I wanted you to think. That is why I staged the thing the way I did and left that note. Instead I came here and stowed away. It was just that we are partners in all other things. I didn't want to be left out on this."
"You're a selfish brat," he said, kissing her tenderly.
"What next?" she asked. "Why did you have to come along at all? Couldn't you have fired the rockets by remote control?"
"Yes. I could have. After that I would have lost control. The giant atom must be gotten rid of at all costs, and I mean completely. If the timing had been wrong, it would have hit the moon. If you can imagine the moon shrunk to a fireball one ten thousandth its size but with the same mass, you can imagine also how little benefited the earth would be by transferring the cancer atom from here to there. Think, too, of how much worse it would be if I were to dump the atom here and it should wander into the field of Jupiter and set that enormous planet afire."
"Or let it drop into the sun to turn it into a raging nova," added Kitty. "Yes, I see now why you had to do it this way."
They fell silent, gazing at the jewelled skies.
"Let's have a look at our passenger," said Bennion, after a time.
He pulled over the periscope that gave a view of the interior of the ship. All that could be seen was a field of intolerable brilliance.
"I'm afraid our baby has eaten its way out of its shell. Next it will go for the driving tubes and the hull. A spaceship with a ravenous parasite in its bowels is not destined to last long, my dear."
Her laugh came as a merry tinkle.
"Don't go melodramatic on me, Stevie darling," she said.
"I won't," he cried. "I was simply trying to prepare you for something. That was all."
He reached for a lever and gave it a vicious pull. He jabbed at a dozen buttons. The ship shuddered in reply, seemed to twist and be about to roll over. Then it straightened out and went on before. He took another peep through the periscope. He shoved the eyepiece away and began unbuckling his armor.
"We may as well be comfortable," he said. "Take off yours."
There followed the clankings and thuds as the heavy outer garments fell to the deck. They were left in their gray slacks they wore underneath.
"Now," he said, "how about throwing together some chow? I can't remember when I ate last."
She smiled gaily and opened the pantry door. Then her hand reached for a package of food concentrate. She knew the crisis must have been passed.
It was half an hour before they finished breakfast. He smacked his lips and strode to the periscope. There were a few seconds of twiddling and searching before he snapped on the switch that brought the telescreen into full action. The screen went dark and it was as if they were looking out into the velvety star-studded void.
He shifted the controls slightly and a bright star came into view. It was blindingly brilliant, fiercely blue, and its dazzle made all the other stars pale into insignificance.
He sat down and regarded it. She sat down beside him and nestled close to him, seizing his hand and holding it against her cheek.
"Is that it?" she asked.
"That is it," he said simply. "The Star of Hope. There goes our little playmate of Fox Mountain — outward bound, forever and ever. It is the seed, the germ, of a new blue dwarf, but it will have to find its fodder in some other system. What we did was haul it out here into the void and give it a parting kick to speed it on its way. And there it goes, wrapped in the fragments of Buck Turner's Ark. Now we're through. We're on our way home."
She snuggled closer. He placed an arm about her.
"When do we land?" she asked.
"Say," he cried, sitting up and taking his arm away, "you're a cool one. You are as matter of fact about this as if we were out for a spin in a car."
"Why not?" she said. "I got used to the idea days ago when I first tumbled to what you were up to. Don't forget that I can read blueprints too. This control car was too much like the little Katherine to be funny. That was what gave me my first hunch. And then the detaching gear and all that. I saw you could unhook it in space and let the rest of the big ship drift on. After that, when I climbed up here yesterday and saw the Anrad lining — "
"You're just too smart," he said, smothering her in kisses. "A guy can't get away with a thing."
"No," she said, when she caught her breath, "not when he tells you right at the outset that he has an ace up his sleeve."
The old quarry was an almost circular hole, a pit fully one hundred feet deep and with hewn walls that rose perpendicularly from the floor of the man-made crater. For a secret workshop the place had been ideally chosen. It lay high up in barren and sparsely wooded foothills in a section too poor to support so much as a rabbit. People rarely came there any more, now that the quarry was closed. There was no inducement — not even for game.
Which made the purring presence of the sleek automobile all the more inexplicable. But Steve Bennion knew perfectly well what he was doing. This old quarry some fifty miles up in the hills from the Bennion Research Laboratory belonged to him. He had spent a lot of solitary time up here, working privately on a project which he was exhibiting today for the first time.
Parking the car, Bennion assisted his lone companion out of the seat and led the way to the sheer edge of the cliff. He pointed downward toward the center of the abandoned quarry at what looked from here like a bronzed Easter egg resting on a giant ice-skate, within a stockade.
"There she is, Kitty," he said simply. "Inside that circle of dilapidated fencing. I screwed the last bolt home and made the final electrical connection yesterday. I wanted you to see her first."
Bennion's companion, a tall and unusually pretty girl, as deeply bronzed as he was; stared downward with widening brown eyes.
"Steve!" she exclaimed. "Not the completed space ship! You kept it secret while you worked on it?"
Steve Bennion smiled a trifle ruefully. "That's right," he admitted. "Now if we can just keep Bennion Research going for the few months necessary to perfect an atomic fuel — we'll be rich and famous in spite of General Atomics, Incorporated. At long last we can let the wedding bells ring out."
A shadow crossed the girl's face. She quickly tried to hide it as she moved closer, letting her arm rest against him.
"It's — it's wonderful, Steve," she murmured. "But I'm really afraid. You shouldn't have taken the entire last week off from your research work for Magnesium Metals. The bank has been calling up every day about that finance note."
"Oh, that," responded Bennion in quick relief. "They'll renew again. And as soon as we finish this job for Magnesium Metals we'll pay it off. Let's go down into the pit, Kitty. I can't rest until you've seen the first practical use for Anrad."
"How do we get down? Fly?" the girl asked, indicating the sheer drop.
Bennion laughed and stepped over to the car. From the baggage locker he took a boatswain's chair and a heavy coil of line. He led the way along the quarry edge to an old but sturdy derrick. In former days the derrick had been used to haul up the products of the quarry. Of late Bennion had used it to send down the plates and parts for the experimental space ship he had designed and built.
At the derrick he quickly rigged the bos'un's chair to the boom and rove his line through the end sheave.
"Ready," he cried. "Hop in, Kitty. Shut your eyes and have faith."
Aided by her employer and fiancé Katherine Pennell got into the seat for her descent into the quarry, but she didn't shut her eyes. She wasn't the eye-shutting kind. Instead, she was smiling like a gleeful and excited child, as Bennion swung her out over the abyss.
When she got out at the bottom, he made the upper end of the rope secure and then slid nimbly down it. A short brisk walk across the chip-strewn quarry floor brought them to the door of the fence. Bennion unlocked the padlock and took her inside the enclosure.
"She's a beauty," exclaimed Katherine, gazing up at the gleaming metallic vessel that had been erected within the frame of a launching cradle. The daylight was fading down here, but the fine, graceful lines of the ship were evident. The sheen on its special phosphor bronze hull plates glowed brightly.
"I've named her the Katherine, in honor of you," Bennion said, pleased with her delight over his handiwork, for he had spent all his spare time for three gruelling years in building the craft. "Climb that ladder and I will show you what it is like inside."
The ship rested at an angle, looking much like an airplane bomb, nose pointed up. Entry could be made through a port a little over half-way forward that led into the control room. Although she gave the impression of possessing tremendous power and speed, the ship was a tiny one, hardly exceeding forty feet. Therefore the climb was an easy one. Bennion waited at the foot of the ladder until the girl had reached the top. He gave one final proud glance toward the as yet useless driving tubes clustered about the sharp tail-tip of the tear-drop-shaped vessel. Then he climbed the ladder behind Katherine. He inserted another key and let her go in.
"It's even duckier inside," she remarked, surprised, as he snapped on the lights for her to see.
The room was circular and switch-boards and instrument panels lined the walls. Kitty noticed a cabinet where cooking could be done. Two spring-slung hammocks indicated where its two passengers would sleep. Overhead there were a number of optical instruments for observations of the stars that would be seen through the many round lucite ports that faceted the domed ceiling.
"Anrad?" she inquired, pointing at the black curtains neatly folded back beside each of the viewports.
"Yes. The first man to hop into space is likely to get a lot of surprises. We can't know what fierce radiation is loose up there above the screen of our atmosphere. I'm taking no chances. The material of those curtains is Anrad."
"Anrad" was their abbreviation of the fuller term Anradiaphane, a substance not unlike rubber in appearance and texture, though far different in its qualities. Its composition was their own well-guarded secret, for it was one of his more recent inventions of which Steve Bennion Was most proud. Anrad possessed the miraculous virtue of being able to stop the terrible Gamma rays far more effectively than even lead. A thin sheet of it, made into a garment, was a safer screen than clumsy and ponderous armor made of several inches of lead.
Bennion frowned momentarily. Mention of Anrad reminded him of unpleasant things. Given an incorrupt government, he would have patented this invention long ago. But sad experience had made him cagey. Three times before he had made application for patents on other important ideas and processes, only to have them rejected with the curt statement that the identical idea had been patented a day or so before by the powerful General Atomics Corporation.
Other independent research workers had had similar experiences — much too often to be explained away as coincidences, even if the great electronics combine did possess wonderful laboratories of its own and had many brilliant scientists oh its payroll. Thus Bennion had come to the conclusion that something was radically wrong with the Patent Office. This had driven him to secrecy and taught him to keep notebooks in cipher. For, ironically enough, he was actually paying to General Atomics exorbitant royalties for the privilege of using some of his own stolen inventions!
"Have a look below," he said, more soberly, trying to dismiss the subject from his mind. He lifted a trapdoor and showed her how to climb down.
Under the floor of the control room were the recoil cylinders that let the floor above spring back under sharp acceleration and thereby cushion the shock of the takeoff. Below them were storerooms, air and water recovery machines, and the spare fuel bins. Lowest of all was the motor room. Up into this chamber projected the butts of the driving tubes. On top of them was built a compact little cyclotron, actuated by its own motor. Its job would be — when suitable fuel was supplied — to start it into atomic eruption.
"Well, honey, you've seen it all," said Bennion at length. "Perhaps I have been too optimistic — building the ship before the final rocket fuel has been prepared — but I know that is merely a matter of time now."
"I hope you are right, Steve," the girl said earnestly. "But something worries me. I don't know why — or how. But I do, too! I've been wrong not to tell you before. But you've been acting so much like a kid at Christmas that I hated to spoil things. Steve, a car was driven out to the lab yesterday morning and stopped near the gates. Four men got out and studied the building for a long time through glasses. And they made a lot of notes."
Bennion frowned down at her troubled face. Then he smiled.
"So they spied, eh? And what did it matter? It will take more powerful glasses than any I know of to reveal what goes on behind our lab walls. Don't let it bother you."
"I wouldn't have — only one of those men was Farquhar," she admitted reluctantly.
"What?" ejaculated Bennion. "Come on! Let's get out of here!"
The name of Farquhar startled the electronic engineer. And with good reason. Farquhar was the vice-president and general manager of the greedy General Atomics Company. Whenever he showed a personal interest in a plant or a man, that plant or man was as good as gone. He was ever anxious to acquire brains as well as equipment and completed inventions — always on the cheapest terms.
Thrice already had Steve Bennion been cheated of the just rewards for his work. Now, one of the few surviving independent research engineers, Bennion thought of that overdue bank note. One of General Atomics' favorite tricks was to catch a man in a neat financial trap and then give him the choice of ruin or going to work for the monopolistic company that wrecked him.
More deeply concerned than he wanted his secretary and assistant to know, Bennion hustled her out of the ship and down the ladder. Hastily padlocking the heavy fence door behind him, Bennion left the girl to follow and bounded across the quarry in great leaping strides. By the time Katharine reached the waiting sling chair, he was almost at the end of his feverish overhand climb up the rope to the top of the pit. Without waiting for a breather, he began hauling her up.
Within two minutes they were careening down the rough mountain trail, heading back toward the laboratory at a furious and dangerous speed.
"When I came up here with you today," the girl explained breathlessly, "I left Billy on guard at the gate. I instructed Mike not to leave the office until we got back. They would die for you, Steve. Please, why the great hurry?"
Bennion laughed shortly, harshly.
"You don't know that pirate Farquhar like I do, Kitty," he said grimly. "No, danger of Billy and Mike having to die for me. Those General Atomic burglars are too smooth to do things in such a clumsy manner. Their strong-arm squad is made up of clever lawyers and grasping bankers. I thought I was preparing an ace in the hole in building the Katherine, and I may have been asleep on a more important job."
The car was on the paved road now, and the going was smoother. Bennion's foot was pressed hard against the accelerator, and the car fairly roared down through the foothills.
"Oh!", exclaimed Katherine faintly. Then: "If things do get bad, Steve, could we get together another stake by selling the little space ship?"
"No!" he shouted fiercely. "Nobody could use it without proper fuel, and those leeches have drained my brains long enough. I'll destroy the Katherine with my own hands before I'll let those bloodsuckers go crawling around through her. We can't afford to let General Atomics have the Katherine. They must never know, even that she has been built! The Katherine is ours alone; I won't even proceed with my fuel research as long as she is in jeopardy!"
Thirty minutes later they roared around the last curve and came into view of the research laboratory. What they saw sent a foreboding chill through their hearts!
Several cars and trucks were parked before the plant gate, and that stood wide open. Most of the vehicles displayed the arrogant trademark of General Atomics, but two of them were police cars. Several policemen were guarding the gate, and, overalled strange workmen swarmed in and out of the building.
Bennion brought his car to a screaming stop and leaped out. He strode over to the nearest policeman.
"What is going on here?" he demanded.
The cop shrugged, but pointed to a typewritten notice wired to the fence. Bennion gave it only a glance, for its heading told him what it meant. The document was entitled, "Notice of Execution Of Foreclosure and Dispossess." Bennion stormed past the grinning guards and into his own front yard. Four men on ladders were affixing a sign over the door of the laboratory. The sign said, GENERAL ATOMIC CORPORATION — BRANCH PLANT 571-A. Coming out the door was Mr. Price, the assistant cashier of the bank. Price tried to avoid Bennion's angry glance, but could not, so instead he sheepishly tried to explain.