Then, abruptly, he knew that it was true. He knew why it was true. It increased his anger over the situation and the treatment of Gail and the children.
"According to this paper," he said icily, "my fellow-countrymen have decided to pay a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, and to sell you down the river. They suggest an international UN committee to receive custody of you children. That committee could then set to work on you to find out where you came from, why, and when you are likely to be searched for. Now, you know and so do I that part of what they found out they wouldn't accept. Time-travel is impossible. So when you children told them where you come from they wouldn't believe it. They'd try to pry back behind what they'd consider a lie. They'd use different techniques of inquiry. They'd use inhibition-releasing drugs. They'd ..."
Fran's expression did not change. Yet it was not passive.
"Which will not happen," said Soames in sudden fury, "except over my dead body! Gail feels the same way. So let's go! We've got to plan a really king-size monkey-wrench to throw into these works!"
He stepped on the motorbike pedal. He swung on down the winding mountain road for the lowlands. He went into a relatively small town. He bought a pup-tent, pliers, a small camp-stove; a camp-lantern; food; blankets; matches.
They went back into the foothills and settled down to the strangest scientific conference in history. The scene of the conference was a remote and strictly improvised encampment by the side of a briskly-flowing trout-stream. They fished. They talked. They drew diagrams at each other.
Fran's English had improved remarkably, but this was a highly technical discussion. It was two days before Soames had the information he needed firmly in his mind. He made a working drawing of what had to be built. He realized that the drawing itself was a simplification of a much more sophisticated original device. It was adapted to be made out of locally available materials. It was what Fran had made and tried at Navajo Dam.
"Which," said Soames, frowning, "proved not to work. You didn't realize the local resources. This thing works, obviously, because a terrifically strong electric field is cut off abruptly and collapses instantly. The original apparatus—the one I burnt—no doubt had a very fine gimmick to break a heavy current flow without making an arc. The trouble at Navajo Dam was that it did arc—and how! That was a mess!"
He paused, considering. Since Soames was not looking at him, Fran regarded him with infinite respect.
"The problem," said Soames, thinking hard, "is a glorified job of turning off an electric light without making a spark at the switch. That's all. It doesn't matter how long the current flows. The thing is that it must stop instantly. So we turn the whole business inside out.
"Instead of making a terrific steady current and cutting it off, I'm going to start with it not flowing and use a strobe-light pack. Every amateur photographer has one. They give a current of eight hundred amperes and twenty-five hundred volts for the forty-thousandth of a second. The juice doesn't flow long enough to burn anything out. It cuts itself off. There's nothing to maintain an arc.
"The really tricky part," he said uncomfortably, "may be the stealing of a helicopter. But I guess I can manage it."
He left Fran fishing and went down to the nearest town again to buy eccentric items of equipment. Copper foil. Strobe-light packs, two of them. He could use foil instead of large-area heat-dissipating units, because the current would flow so briefly. He would get a terrific current, of course. Two strobe-light packs in series would give him four million watts of power for part of the wink of an eyelid.
When he got back to the camp, Soames called to Fran. "We've got to get to work. I don't think we've got much time. I had hopes of a castaway-gadget coming up, but it hasn't."
He began to assemble the device which would substitute for the larger, heavier, much more massive apparatus he'd destroyed on the Antarctic ice-sheet. The work went swiftly. Soames had re-designed the outfit, and a man can always build a thing of his own design more easily than something from another man's drawings.
Before sunset the thing was done. Fran was very respectful. This apparatus was less than a quarter the size of the one his own people had prepared for the same purpose. And it was self-powered, too; it was independent of outside power-supply.
"I'd like to talk to your people about this," said Soames grimly. "I do think things can be transposed in space, and this should work that way as well as in time. But starting at one end has me stymied."
He abandoned the pup-tent and equipment.
"Either we won't need them," he said, "or we won't be able to use them."
The battered, ancient motorcycle took them into the night. Soames had studied road-maps and he and Fran had discussed in detail the route to Navajo Dam—using stilts to cross electrified fences—from the hidden missile base. Soames was sure that with Fran's help he could find the pseudo-village where Gail and the children remained. It would call for a helicopter. But before that there was a highly necessary operation which would also go best with a helicopter to help. So when they left that pup-tent camp they headed toward a very minor, local airfield where Soames had once landed. It had hangars for half a dozen cheap private planes and for two helicopters used mostly for crop-dusting.
At the airfield Soames laid the motorcycle beside the edge of the clear area, and left Fran with it, to wait. He moved quietly through the darkness toward close-up buildings with no lights anywhere except in one room reserved for a watchman.
Fran waited, breathing fast. He heard night-insects and nothing else. It seemed a horribly long time—before he heard the grinding noise of a motor being cranked. It caught immediately. There was a terrific roaring tumult inside a building. The large door of a hangar tilted and went upward, and a door opened from the watchman's lighted room and he came shouting outside.
The roaring of motors changed. The door of the hangar was quite open. A bellowing thing came moving out, whirling huge black vanes against the sky. It boomed more loudly still, and lifted, and then drifted with seeming clumsiness across the level airfield while the night watchman shouted after it.
Fran turned on the motorcycle headlight as he'd been told, and picked up the apparatus Soames had made to use strobe-light packs in. The 'copter swept toward him, six feet above-ground. It came down and Fran swarmed up into its cabin. Then the motors really thundered and the 'copter climbed for the sky.
Soames drove without lights and headed southward.
A transcontinental highway appeared below. It was plainly marked by the headlights of more than usually heavy traffic on it. He followed that highway.
Fran rode in a sort of stilly rapture. Soames said:
"Not worried, Fran?"
Fran shook his head. Then, boy-like, he turned on the transistor radio to show his nonchalance. A voice spoke. He'd have shifted to music but Soames caught a word or two.
"Hold it!" he commanded. "Put it so I can hear!"
Fran raised the volume and held the small radio so Soames could hear it above the motor-noise.
What he heard, at this moment, was the official United States broadcast announcing the ending of all real menace of atomic attack. By a fortunate freak of fate, somebody in authority realized that it was more important to get the news out than to make a professionalized production of it. So a tired but confident voice said very simply that American technicians seemed to have solved the problem of defense attack by atomic bombs and guided missiles. There had been, the voice said steadily, recent marked improvements in electric induction furnaces. The basic principle of an induction furnace was the evolution of heat in the material it was desired to melt, instead of merely in a container for the stuff that was to be melted. Within the past four days induction furnaces of a new type had proved able to induce heat in chosen objects up to miles. It had been expected to smelt metal ore in the veins in which it was found, and to make mines yield their product as metal without digging up and puttering with useless rock. But now this apparatus had been combined with radar.