Juarez sat on the floor near a broken window and cleaned his machine pistol. "I think that it is time to kill Lorin and get out of here," he said, as he placed a fresh clip in the magazine. "It will serve us to good advantage."
"Fool!" Gomez exclaimed. "If they found us with a dead man on our hands, we wouldn't stand a chance. I have used this place enough to know that they have us pinned in. We can use Lorin as a bargaining point. We will arrange to take him with us and drop him by parachute. But—the parachute will not open. A convertiplane, which I have called, will meet us above the clouds and take us away before they can stop us."
"They will not trust our word," Juarez said. "We cannot get away with it."
"Oh, but we can," Gomez said. "The police know that Lorin's death would have regrettable results. Even the fact that he is a citizen of the North American Union would be enough to start trouble, let alone his position as a key research man on the neutron project. They will do anything to see that he remains alive. The scheme will further enrage the North Americans and might perhaps incite them to war."
"I see," replied Juarez. "An excellent plan. Let's contact the police, and see what happens."
Unseen by the guards around the house, four policemen crawled through the snow. Wearing white uniforms, they blended so well with their background that even the sniperscope men didn't see them. Their view was limited by the fact that most of the large lights that had flooded the area with infra red radiation had been shattered by gunfire. Individual beams were insufficient to sweep the whole area.
Carrying thirty-shot rocket launchers and rocket powered gas bombs, they took positions around the house and aimed the slender guns. At a radio signal, streams of red fire shot from the tubes, and the small rockets tore through every window in the house. In a few minutes, the place was saturated with sleep gas. Not a man moved throughout the building. Policemen in gas masks converged on the house.
Roger awoke on a stretcher aboard a police plane. A police officer sitting beside the stretcher answered his dazed inquiries. "You're on a police plane. We gassed the place where you were being held, and then moved in and took over." He grinned. "You looked so peaceful that I didn't have the heart to give you stimulants."
"How long has it been?" Roger asked worriedly. "I'd like to call my wife as soon as I can. She's probably worried sick by now."
"It's been close to three hours," the officer replied. "We had to buck a snowstorm when we came out of that valley. We knew it was coming, but we thought that we could move in ahead of it and get you out before it struck. Unfortunately, they spotted us with those big infra red lights of theirs and threw our timing all out of kilter. We should be in Denver in less than half an hour."
Twenty minutes later the plane set down on the landing stage at the top of police headquarters. Roger was helped to his feet and led from the plane across the wind and snow lashed platform to an elevator.
A few minutes later, he sat in the office of the Federal Police Commissioner for the Rocky Mountain district. Roger asked permission to use the desk viewphone and quickly put through a call to Arctic City. In a few minutes, Linda's face appeared on the screen. When she saw Roger her face lit up with joy. "Roger!" she exclaimed. "I've been so worried about you. I haven't been able to sleep for days, wondering what they might do to you."
"I'm all right, honey," Roger reassured her. "I'll be home in less than a day if the police don't detain me here."
"Better have her come to Chicago," the commissioner interrupted. "You'll have to stay there until we get this mess straightened out."
"I guess it would be better for you to come to Chicago. The police say that it'll take a while to clear this business up. Maybe you'd better take a jet. It would be more comfortable for you."
"I'll take the evening rocket," Linda replied determinedly.
"OK," Roger said with a grin. "I'll see you this evening then."
"Your wife seems anxious to see you," the officer remarked drily. "Well, you may as well tell me about this business. I'll send you on the rocket this afternoon so that you can meet your wife. We're not sure just what was behind this kidnapping."
Roger narrated the events of the past two weeks explaining the part the Arabs were playing in the troubles between North and South America.
"The Arabs, eh," the officer mused. "I'm sending the prisoners to Chicago with you. I don't think that it will be too hard to get a cerebral analysis writ. At least I'm going to recommend such action."
"Cerebral analysis?" Roger asked. "That must be something new."
"It is," replied the officer. "This particular development of the encepholograph is so new that not many people know about it. The machine in Chicago is the only one in existence. We use truth drug writs to make it legal and still keep it secret. It isn't exactly according to Hoyle, but we have to be careful these days. It takes an expert to read the charts and, even then, only very clear thoughts can be picked up."
"It sounds like something out of science fiction," Roger commented.
"So did a lot of things we now take for granted," replied the officer.
Late that afternoon, Roger sat aboard a rocket that screamed through the upper atmosphere on the last leg of its flight to Chicago. He watched through an eyeport as the ship lost altitude and circled the city, finally coming to rest with squealing tires on the concrete runway. As soon as the locks were opened, Roger, accompanied by a police officer, left the ship and went through the boarding tunnel into the bustling terminal building. Roger's eyes searched the crowd until they found Linda. He hurried toward her, and in a few minutes they were in each other's arms.
After two days of quiet relaxation, a plainclothes man took them to the tower of the Security Building which housed the Federal Police. The place was an electronic wonderland, with banks of instruments lining the walls. Gomez had been drugged and strapped into a large chair in the center of the room. His scalp was shaved, and several electrodes had been taped on. During the next hour and a half, the silence was broken only by the occasional click of a switch and the scratch of pens recording data. At the end of that time the electrodes were removed, and Gomez was carried from the room to sleep off the anesthesia. One after another, the prisoners went through the same process. Gradually the data added up and revealed the plan that was meant to plunge two nations into the horrors of atomic war.
An officer gave quick orders. "I want all out going spaceships checked for sabotage. These men didn't know the technical details. The least obvious thing to do would be to tamper with the fuel in such a way that it would explode violently when it was heated in the motors. The nitric acid used in the booster stage would make the best reactant. The rocket would be too close to the ground to drop the booster. Better check the fuel before the rocket carrying those South American officials blasts off."
He turned to Roger. "Would you like to see how we stake out a place?"
"Sure," replied Roger. "Spaceports are always interesting."
They left the building and rode to the rocket field. Night had fallen and the spaceport lay stark and cold in the beams of large floodlights. Three spaceships stood on the field, their bluish sides gleaming in the beams of the floodlights. To the south, a transcontinental rocket rose into the night like a spark from a chimney. The air was bitter with the temperature at eighteen below.
"Take a look," the police officer handed Roger a pair of binoculars. Roger placed the instrument to his eyes, and the side of the center rocket leaped toward him. He saw a man in the red overalls of a fuel technician climb the gantry alongside the center rocket and push something into a valve on the side of the booster stage, near its juncture with the main part of the ship.
"Do you see that mechanic on the center rocket?" Roger asked.
"Let's see," the officer replied and looked toward that rocket. "Yes, I see him now. A mechanic shouldn't be pushing anything into that valve. That particular valve is used to jettison fuel in an emergency. A blast of compressed air will usually clear anything out of it. If that doesn't work, the valve has to be taken apart to be cleaned. I'd like to know just what he shoved into that valve."
The officer spoke briefly into his pocket radio. Four policemen moved toward the entrances that led into the deep pit where the rocket stood. The technician closed the valve and climbed down the ladder. As soon as his feet touched the concrete floor of the pit, he was seized by the waiting policemen. A pistol shot cracked, and the prisoner sagged to the floor with a hole in his chest. Instant confusion reigned in the pit, and in that confusion the assassin somehow escaped.
When the officer and Roger arrived, they found the policemen talking with a fuel technician. The technician left the group and climbed the ladder to the valve. He opened it and inserted a spring operated probe.
"The valve's clean," he shouted down. "I'll take off some of the nitric acid." He did so, collecting the liquid in a small sample bottle which he carried on his belt. Climbing down the ladder, he handed the bottle to the officer in charge, who handed it to Roger. Roger unscrewed the cap and cautiously sniffed the contents. "I can't be sure, but if it's what I think it is, you'd better not have the tanks drained until morning. Give it a chance to dissolve. Otherwise you'll have some left in the tanks. It doesn't react very rapidly at low temperatures."
"Just what do you think it is?" the officer asked.
"Well," Roger replied, "it's probably some organic compound that would react with the nitric acid to form an explosive nitrate. Of course, it could be an ammonium compound that would react to form ammonium nitrate. That would do the job just as well."
Three weeks later the agents were brought to trial for espionage and conspiracy to start a war. The whole story of the Arab plot came out. Following the lead of the North American Union, the South American Republic carried out an investigation of its own, and discovered the part the Arabs had played in various incidents on the southern continent.
Later that summer, the Gibraltar Conference met to settle grievances between the western powers and the League of Islam. King Ignatius II of the restored Spanish monarchy acted as a mediator. Reluctantly the North American Union agreed to let the Arabs build a spaceport in the Sahara, thus giving them a chance to trade directly with the Lunar colonies. On their part, the Arabs agreed to internationalize the Suez Canal area, on condition of free passage across the isthmus for Arab traffic between Egypt and Palestine. The Arabs refused flatly to allow a re-establishment of the Republic of Israel, but would allow Jews to settle in the Holy Land under yearly quotas. Despite reluctance and bitterness, a compromise was reached, and war was averted ... for the moment.
About a week after the trial Roger and Linda sat at a table in the large Spaceport Restaurant. Through the large window facing the rocket field, they could see clouds driven by an early March wind. Intermittent flurries of rain splashed against the glass. Roger happened to look up and see an elderly man approaching the table; his face lit up with recognition. "Well, Professor Nolan," he said, offering his hand, "I'm glad to see you."
"I'm glad to see that you got out of that trouble all right," Nolan replied as they shook hands.
"This is my wife, Linda," Roger said. "We're just about to order lunch. Won't you join us?"
"It would be a pleasure," replied Nolan as he sat down. "I'd like to hear about what happened to you."
Roger talked as he had punched their order into the robot server, and through most of the meal that arrived a few moments later.
When he had finished his story Nolan asked him, "Do you intend to go back to Arctic City, now that this is over?"
"No," Roger answered, "The pile at Arctic City is nearly completed. My part of the work is done anyway. I've been offered a job on the neutron rocket project at the Lunar laboratories, and Linda and I are leaving for the moon in about an hour. I enjoyed working there before. The moon colonists seem to have something that most earthmen lack.... I guess you'd call it a pioneering spirit, a desire to explore. They are willing to accept new ideas.
"But that's enough about myself. I've been wondering how you got away."
"Simple enough," Nolan replied. "The men who were left behind pulled out and left me at the camp when they heard about your rescue. They probably didn't care to kill me if they didn't have to. They left while I was asleep and probably went over the pole into Russia. They took my ship, but I was able to call for help with the radio. What happens to them doesn't matter anyway. We'll probably never hear of them again.
"I suppose it won't be long before we have colonies on all the planets with that neutron rocket you mentioned."
"It'll be a while yet," Roger said. "There are a lot of problems involved in the development of a neutron rocket, and as long as we have to use a fuel processed by passing hydrogen through an electric arc and into an expensive organic compound at low temperatures, space travel will be too expensive for anything more than the exploration expeditions that have been sent to Mars and Venus."
The voice of the announcer interrupted them. "The spaceshipGoddardis loading passengers from tunnel eleven. All passengers must be aboard in twenty minutes."
Roger and Linda rose from the table. "That's our ship," Roger said. "We'd better get aboard. Goodbye, Professor Nolan. I hope we meet again."
"Goodbye, young fellow, and good luck." Nolan gripped Roger's hand.
Thirty minutes later the professor stood at the window and watched the preparations for blast off. The tail gantry crane moved away from the rocket, and a siren blared forth its warning. The booster motors were started, splashing green flame into the pit and shaking the ground with their roar. The tall ship rose slowly at first, and then more rapidly as it climbed a column of green flame into the clearing sky. It grew small and disappeared. A few minutes later the ship's atomic drive came to life like a tiny new sun that was a beacon on the path to space.