When a radar detected a missile or an enemy plane, the broadcast said carefully, an induction furnace of the new type was turned upon the plane or missile. The effect was exactly that of enclosing the missile in a burning blast-furnace. It melted. The most careful tests assured America, then, that any city protected by radar-controlled remote-induction furnaces was safe against atomic attack and its dread destruction.
And at the time of this broadcast, every major center of population in the United States was already protected by the new defense-system. The cities which had been most vulnerable were now the safest places in the nation. And it was found, added the contented voice, that atomic bombs were not detonated by the induction fields. The induced currents seemed to freeze firing mechanisms. It appeared impossible to design a detonating device which would blow up a bomb before it melted.
The broadcast ended in a matter-of-fact statement that plans for the defense-system had been given to all the allies of the United States, that London was already protected and Paris would be within hours, and that within days the nations which were not allies would be assisted to establish defenses, so that atomic war need not be feared in the future.
Soames listened with an odd expression on his face.
"That," he said, "started out as a gadget for a castaway to stop arrows that savages were sniping at him with. I'm very pleased."
There was no more for him to say. The pleasure he felt, of course, would be the only reward he was likely to get. At the moment he was bent upon an enterprise his fellow-Americans would have regarded with horror.
Far, far below and surrounded by the blackness of tree-covered ground in starlight, there was an irregular shape of brightness. It was miles long. It reflected the stars. It was the flood-control reservoir behind the Polder Dam. There was no power-plant here. This reservoir merely took the place of some hundreds of thousands of acres of timbered-off forest which once had controlled floods more effectively.
Without a word, Soames slanted the 'copter down. Presently it hovered delicately over the dam's crest and at its very center. It touched. The rotor ceased to whirl. The motor stopped. There was a great silence.
Fran scrambled down. Soames swung after him. Together, they set up the device which was a time-transposition unit, with its complicated small antenna aimed out at the waters of the reservoir.
"I've gambled," said Soames, "that we understand each other. Now you pull the string."
There was a cord which would discharge the strobe-packs through the apparatus itself. The discharge would cease with absolute abruptness. The packs would then recharge themselves from the special batteries included in the device.
Fran pulled the cord.
There was no noise except a small and inadequate "snap." It seemed that nothing happened. But there was suddenly a hole in the surface of the reservoir. It was a large hole.
Something came up out of it. It glittered in ghostly fashion in the starlight. It rose up and up and up. It was a cylinder with a rounded top and a diameter of fifty feet or so. It rose and rose, very deliberately. Then a rounded lower end appeared. It floated in the air.
Fran jerked the cord again. Another hole in the lake. Another round metal thing rising slowly, one would even say peacefully into the starlight. Fran, grinning happily, jerked the cord again and yet again....
There were eight gigantic shining cylinders in the air when he stopped and stood back, his eyes shining. A vast metal thing floated ponderously near. A port opened and a voice called down in the language the children used among themselves. Fran spoke back, remembering to turn on his sensory communicator.
Fran talked briskly as if to himself. But it was standard sensory-communication practice. After a long time he turned to Soames.
"My people say—" a pause—"thank you—" another pause, "and ask for Zani and Mal and Hod."
"Tell them to make a column of themselves and float right here, going up to ten thousand feet or so. Radars will pick them out. Planes will come in the night to see what they are. They'll guess. I doubt very much that they'll attack. Tell your people simply to keep them worried until we come back."
Fran zestfully swarmed back into the helicopter. Soames told him:
"Turn off your communicator. You'll be listened in on. But maybe the monitoring men are having their hair stand on end from the welter of communications from the ships!"
Fran wriggled with excitement as the 'copter rose once more.
Soames had an odd feeling that all this could not be true. But it was, down to the last least detail which had made it thinkable for him to defy all his fellow-men to keep faith with four children whose lives and errand he'd interfered with. The matter had been a very natural oversight, at first.
Of course Soames had assumed that the children's civilization had been one of very millions of people. A small city cannot establish or maintain a great technological civilization. He had been right. He'd assumed, even, that Fran's people were able to travel between planets. Again he'd been right. But the thing he hadn't thought of was that the development of transposition in time—and transposition in space would come later—wouldn't occur to anybody unless there was absolutely no other possible solution to the problem the Old Race faced. They wouldn't have tried to solve it until the Fifth Planet burst and the doom of the world they lived on was self-evident. They wouldn't have worked at it until they realized that Venus and Mercury were due to be shattered after Earth, just as Mars was bombarded before it.
So the struggle to escape through time was begun in the fifty-ninth minute of the last hour. Cities struggled to build time-ships and get a pioneer vessel through to future time. Asteroids plunged down upon them, wiping them out. Cities struggled on, passing to each other—to the thinning number of those who remained—such solutions to such problems as they developed. But there were fewer and fewer.... The city from which the children came had fallen in ruins from earth-shocks, and only a fraction of its population continued frantically to labor on....
But Soames hadn't thought of this. It was Gail who found it out from the children with her. And she'd told Soames that he must help Fran at any cost, and told the reason in two words and a number. Speaking of Fran's people, she'd told Soames,
"Only 2,000 left."
It was true. It checked with the number of ships that came through to modernity. Only two thousand people remained of Fran's race. They could not conquer two billions of humankind. They could not rule them. They could only take refuge among them, and share what knowledge they could with them.
Fran leaned happily against Soames' shoulder. The 'copter swung away from a broad wide valley.
Fran pointed. Two valleys came together here. He, who had come away from the missile base on foot, was an authority on how to get back to it in a helicopter.
The 'copter flew on.
Fran said:
"There!"
And there were small lights, the color of kerosene lamps. But they were not lamps, but electric lights. Soames sent the 'copter sweeping toward the remarkably convincing Rocky Mountain village. The ship barely cleared an electrified fence, the last of three. But if there were sentries who might have fired on it, they had already heard of the arrival of a fleet of alien spaceships. Nothing so human as a helicopter could be an enemy when an invading fleet from who-knows-where was just reported....