Soames nodded, in the darkness.
"It would. A pattern of heat-treatment might give a metal all sorts of properties we haven't guessed at." He added sardonically, "And it could be so simple that a boy could remember and do it!"
"He made six communicators," said Gail. "I insisted on six. And then I chose two at random for safety's sake, I suppose. And he and the other children hid theirs. I tried these two. They work. One is for you. Of course."
She fumbled something into his hand. It was tiny; hardly larger than a match.
"You push in the end. It works as long as you push it."
Soames pressed on one end where there was something that felt like the head of a pin. It probably was. It gave a little, and instantly he saw what Gail saw and felt what she felt, his hand clasping hers. He released the tiny object and again was only himself.
"Turn yours off," he said harshly. "Remind the kids that this sort of thing can be intercepted."
"I'll tell them," said Gail.
"They're much worse off than they were," he told her. "A little while ago all the world wanted to learn from the kids. Now it's afraid they'll learn from it, about the people in it. I think everybody'd be quite willing to forego all possible benefits from their coming, if only something would happen to them."
"But they can't pry into secrets!" protested Gail. "You know they can't read minds! They can't!"
"But they have the reputation and have to suffer for it," said Soames.
They were then very close to the pseudo general store. Gail put her hand lightly on Soames' arm. "Brad, please be careful."
He went into the store. He went through to the stock-room behind, pressed a button, and an elevator door opened in a rather surprising manner. He stepped inside and the elevator lowered him three hundred feet into the earth.
On the way out from the East he'd sunk into gloomy meditation about the situation of the children and for that matter of the world, since their arrival. Fran had an urgent mission he felt he must perform at any risk. He couldn't do it on the missile base.
Fran felt the hatred surrounding all of them from the conclusion of the broadcast. He knew that nobody, anywhere, would help him do something he had to do. So he fled in order to try somehow to send the signal Soames had prevented from beside the wrecked spaceship.
But why must Fran send it? Why hadn't an automatic device been used? Something which could be so ruggedly built that it could not possibly smash....
And suddenly there was an explanation.
Up to this moment Soames had doggedly accepted the idea that the children came out of a past so remote that numbers of years simply had no meaning. The evidence was overwhelming even though the law of the conservation of mass and energy denied the possibility of time-travel. Now, abruptly, Soames saw the infinitely simple answer. Time-travel was possible, provided certain conditions were met. Those conditions would at first instance inevitably produce a monstrous burst of static and an implosion to cause an earth-shock and a concussion wave audible at eighty miles distance. Once communication between time-frames had been established, however ...
The flight of Fran instantly became something so much more alarming than mere danger to Fran, that there was only one thing Soames could possibly do. He'd said he was not Fran's enemy. But he must do anything to keep Fran from carrying out the mission he'd been sent to accomplish.
So when Soames got out of the elevator from the village store, he went directly to a security officer.
"I'm worried about the boy Fran, who ran away," he observed. "Can you tell me what happened?"
"I'd like somebody to tell me!" said the security officer morbidly. "If he ran, he had wings on his shoes. And now he's out he's got me scared! You know those telepathic gadgets in the belts the children wore? We took 'em away. We opened one of 'em up, but we left the others in working order. We tried them. When two men wear them, with both turned on, they sort of half-way read each other's minds. Each man knows what the other is doing and seeing. But one man by himself can't do a thing. Two men can do a lot. It's been suggested that if they knew the trick of it, three men could do all the telepathy they wanted, read minds and all that. We haven't found out the trick, though."
Soames nodded, marvelling at the ability of the human race to find reasons to believe anything it wanted to, whether for sweet vanity's sake or for the sake of scaring itself to death.
"When we first got the belts from the kids," pursued the security officer, "we figured there might be some other folks of the kids' race on Earth, figuring on ways to get 'em loose. We had a belt worn night and day. Nothing. So we stopped monitoring. Then this Fran got away and we started monitoring all over again, trying to pick up any working of belts like these that we didn't know about. And we started picking up stuff right away!"
Soames stared. Zani'd been using one such instrument.
"A man's got one of those belts on," said the security man, frowning, "and it's like he didn't. Nothing happens at all. But after maybe hours, maybe a day or two, suddenly, with his eyes closed, he sees a page of outlandish writing. The kind of writing those kids do. It can't be photographed, because it's only inside your head that you see it. You can't make sense of it. The alphabet isn't ours. The words are the language they talk among themselves. I figure there's a ship somewhere, broadcasting a call to the kids. The call's printed. If the kids had their belts on, and turned on, they could read it. But we got their belts. So this Fran, he broke away to try to make some kind of way to answer that call!"
Soames said nothing. But he was unhappily amused, at himself as well as the security officer. He'd gone to some pains to tell Gail how the children might communicate with Fran without being caught at it. But they knew. They'd produced this theory of a hovering ship of space, broadcasting to Earth to four children hidden somewhere on it. There was no ship. There was only Fran, desperate to perform the task he'd been sent here to do, keeping in touch with the other three children by a tiny unit he'd made out of scrap copper and a straw and a candle-flame. And it was so natural that the fact wasn't guessed!
"How's he managing to eat?" asked Soames. "He's no money and next to no English, and he doesn't know how to act...."
"He's smart!" said the security officer grimly. "He's hiding by day. At night.... People don't usually tell the cops about a bottle of milk missing from their doorsteps. A grocer doesn't report one loaf of bread missing from the package left in front of his store before daybreak. He'd pick a loaf of bread today, and a bottle of milk tomorrow. Sometimes he'd skip. But we figured it out. We got every town in five hundred miles to check up. Bread-truck drivers asked grocery stores. Any bread missing? Milk-men asked their customers. Has anybody been pinching your milk? We found where he was, in Bluevale, close to the Navajo Dam, you know. We set cops to watch. Almost got him yesterday morning. He was after a loaf of bread. A cop fired five shots at him, but he got away. Dropped the loaf of bread, too."
Soames wanted to be sick. Fran was possibly fourteen years old and desperate because his whole civilization depended on him to save them from the destruction falling out of the sky. He was a fugitive on a strange world.
Then Soames' mouth went dry as he realized. Fran had been shot at in Bluevale, which was near the Navajo Dam. The Navajo Dam generated almost as much electric power as Niagara.
"I had a hunch," said the security officer with some grimness, "the kid got past three electric fences, and we don't know how. He must know plenty about electricity. So I began to wonder if he might be hoping to answer that broadcast signal with a signal of his own. He was in Bluevale. We checked up. A roofer lost some sheet copper a couple of days ago. Somebody broke in a storehouse and got away with forty or fifty feet of heavy-gauge copper wire. A man'd have stolen the whole roll. It would be only a kid that'd break off as much as he could carry. See?