Jommy Cross laughed joyously. Let them know. What could they hope to do to him now? There was danger ahead, of course – immense danger, especially when he and Granny reached the surface. The entire tendrilless slan organization must be warned by this time. Nevertheless, that was of the future. For the moment, victory was his, and it was sweet, after so many desperate, tiring hours. Now there was Granny's plan, which involved his separating from her, and disguise.
The laughter faded from his lips. He sat thoughtful, then stalked into the adjoining compartment. The black moneybag he wanted lay on the old woman's lap under the protection of one claw-like hand. Before she could even realize his intention, he had snatched it up. Granny shrieked and jumped at him. Coolly he held her off.
"Don't get excited. I've decided to adopt your plan. I'll try to get by disguised as a human being, and we'll separate. I'm going to give you five thousand of this. The rest you'll get back about a year from now. Here's what you're to do:
"I need a place to live, and so you're going to go up into the mountains and buy a ranch or something. When you're located, put an ad in the local paper. I'll put an answering ad in, and we'll get together. I'll keep the money just in case you decide to double-cross me. Sorry, but you captured me in the first place, and so you'll just have to bear with me. But now I've got to go back and block that tunnel. Someday I'm going to fit this ship with atomic energy, and I don't want them coming here meanwhile."
He'd have to leave this city swiftly, of course, for the time being, the beginning of a continental tour. There must be other tendrilled slans out there. Just as his mother and father had met accidentally, pure chance alone should enable him to meet at least one slan. And besides, there was the first investigation to be made on the still vague though great plan that was taking form in his brain. The plan to think his way to the true slans.
Chapter Twelve
He searched – and he worked. In the quiet fastness of his laboratory on Granny's valley ranch, the plans and projects that his father had impressed upon him were slowly brought to reality. In a hundred ways he learned to control the limitless energy that he held in trust for slans and human beings alike.
He discovered that the effectiveness of his father's invention resulted from two basic facts: the source of power could be as tiny as a few grains of matter; and the output need not take the form of heat.
It could be converted to motion and to vibration, to radiation and – directly – to electricity.
He began to build himself an arsenal. He transformed a mountain near the ranch into a fortress, knowing that it would be inadequate against any concerted attack, but it was something. With an ever vaster protective science behind him, his search grew more determined.
Jommy Cross seemed always to be driving along roads that gleamed toward distant horizons, or in strange cities, each with its endless swarms of human beings. The sun rose and set, and rose and set, and there were dark days of drizzling rains, and there were countless nights. Although he was always alone, loneliness did not touch him, for his expanding soul fed with an always dissatisfied eagerness at the tremendous drama that was daily enacted before his eyes. Everywhere he turned, facets of the tendrilless slan organization met his gaze, and week by week he grew more puzzled. Where were the true slans?
The puzzle seemed a crazy, unanswerable thing that never left him. It followed him now as he walked slowly up a street of the hundredth – or was it the thousandth? – city.
Night lay upon the city, night spattered by countless glittering shop windows and a hundred million blazing lights. He walked to a newsstand and bought all the local papers, then back to his car, that very ordinary-looking, very special battleship on wheels which he never allowed out of his sight. He stood beside the long, low-built machine. A chilling night wind caught at the sheets of the paper as he turned page after page, briefly letting his gaze skim down the columns.
The wind grew colder as he stood there, bringing the damp-sweet smell of rain. A gust of cold air caught an edge of his paper, whipped it madly for a moment, abruptly tore it, then went screaming victoriously down the street, chasing the scrap of paper wildly. He folded the newspaper decisively against the rising clamor of wind and climbed into the car. An hour later he tossed the seven daily papers into a sidewalk wastepaper receptacle. Deep in thought, he re-entered the car and sat behind the steering wheel.
The same old story. Two of the papers were tendrilless slan. It was easy for his mind to note the subtle difference, the special coloration of the articles, the very way the words were used, the distinct difference between the human-owned papers and those operated by the tendrilless slans. Two papers out of seven. But those two had the highest circulation. It was a normal average.
And, once more, that was all there was. Human being and tendrilless slan. No third group, none of the difference that he knew would show him when a paper was operated by true slans, if his theory were right. It remained only to obtain all the weekly papers, and to spend the evening as he had spent the day, driving along the streets, searching, each house, each passing mind; and then, as he drove toward the distant east, the gathering tempest charged like some untamed beast through the black night.
Behind him, the night and the storm swallowed up another city, another failure.
The water lay dark and still around the spaceship in that third year when Jommy Cross finally returned to the tunnel. He swirled around in the mud, turning the blazing force of his atomic-powered machines on the wounded metal thing.
Ten– point steel seared over the hole his disintegrator had carved on that day when he escaped the slan cruisers. And all through one almost endless week a snug-fitting, leech-shaped metal monstrosity hugged inch by inch over the surface of the ship, straining with its frightful power at the very structure of the atoms, till the foot-thick walls of the long, sleek machine were ten-point steel from end to end.
It took him some weeks to analyze the antigravity plates with their electrically built-up vibrations, and to fashion a counterpart which, with grim irony, he left there in the tunnel, for it was on them that the detectors of the tendrilless slans operated. Let them think their craft still there.
Three months he slaved and then, in the dead of one cold October night, the ship backed along six miles of tunnel on a cushion of resistless atomic drive, and plunged up through a mist of icy rain.
The rain became sleet, then snow; then abruptly he was beyond the clouds, beyond earth's petty furies. Above him the vast canopy of the heavens glittered in a blazing array of stars that beckoned to his matchless ship. There was Sirius, the brightest jewel in that diadem, and there was Mars, the red. But it was not for Mars that he was heading today. This was only a short exploratory voyage, a cautious trip to the Moon, a test flight to provide that all-necessary experience which his logic would use as a basis for the long, dangerous journey that seemed to be becoming more inevitable with each passing month of his utterly futile search. Someday he would have to go to Mars.
Beneath him a blur of night-enveloped globe receded. At one edge of that mass, a blaze of light grew more brilliant as he watched and then, abruptly, his contemplation of the glory of the approaching sunrise was jarred by the clanging of an alarm bell. A pointer light flashed on and off discordantly far up on his forward visiplate. Decelerating at full speed, he watched the changing position of the light. Suddenly, the light clicked off and there, at the extreme range of his vision, was a ship.