Duquesne Goes Traveling

: Skylark Three

In the innermost private office of Steel, Brookings and DuQuesne stared

at each other across the massive desk. DuQuesne's voice was cold, his

black brows were drawn together.



"Get this, Brookings, and get it straight. I'm shoving off at twelve

o'clock tonight. My advice to you is to lay off Richard Seaton,

absolutely. Don't do a thing. Nothing, hold everything. Keep on

holding it until I get back, no matt
r how long that may be," DuQuesne

shot out in an icy tone.



"I am very much surprised at your change of front, Doctor. You are the

last man I would have expected to be scared off after one engagement."



"Don't be any more of a fool than you have to, Brookings. There's a lot

of difference between scared and knowing when you are simply wasting

effort. As you remember, I tried to abduct Mrs. Seaton by picking her

off with an attractor from a space-ship. I would have bet that nothing

could have stopped me. Well, when they located me--probably with an

automatic Osnomian ray-detector--and heated me red-hot while I was still

better than two hundred miles up, I knew then and there that they had us

stopped; that there was nothing we could do except go back to my plan,

abandon the abduction idea, and eventually kill them all. Since my plan

would take time, you objected to it, and sent an airplane to drop a

five-hundred-pound bomb on them. Airplane, bomb, and all simply

vanished. It didn't explode, you remember, just flashed into light and

disappeared, with scarcely any noise. Then you pulled several more of

your fool ideas, such as long-range bombardment, and so on. None of

them worked. Still you've got the nerve to think that you can get them

with ordinary gunmen! I've drawn you diagrams and shown you

figures--I've told you in great detail and in one-syllable words exactly

what we're up against. Now I tell you again that they've got

something. If you had the brains of a pinhead, you would know that

anything I can't do with a space-ship can't be done by a mob of ordinary

gangsters. I'm telling you, Brookings, that you can't do it. My way is

absolutely the only way that will work."



"But five years, Doctor!"



"I may be back in six months. But on a trip of this kind anything can

happen, so I am planning on being gone five years. Even that may not be

enough--I am carrying supplies for ten years, and that box of mine in

the vault is not to be opened until ten years from today."



"But surely we shall be able to remove the obstructions ourselves in a

few weeks. We always have."



"Oh, quit kidding yourself, Brookings! This is no time for idiocy! You

stand just as much chance of killing Seaton----"



"Please, Doctor, please don't talk like that!"



"Still squeamish, eh? Your pussyfooting always did give me an acute

pain. I'm for direct action, word and deed, first, last, and all the

time. I repeat, you have exactly as much chance of killing Richard

Seaton as a blind kitten has."



"How do you arrive at that conclusion, Doctor? You seem very fond of

belittling our abilities. Personally, I think that we shall be able to

attain our objectives within a few weeks--certainly long before you can

possibly return from such an extended trip as you have in mind. And

since you are so fond of frankness, I will say that I think that Seaton

has you buffaloed, as you call it. Nine-tenths of these wonderful

Osnomian things, I am assured by competent authorities, are

scientifically impossible, and I think that the other one-tenth exists

only in your own imagination. Seaton was lucky in that the airplane bomb

was defective and exploded prematurely; and your space-ship got hot

because of your injudicious speed through the atmosphere. We shall have

everything settled by the time you get back."



"If you have, I'll make you a present of the controlling interest in

Steel and buy myself a chair in some home for feeble-minded old women.

Your ignorance and unwillingness to believe any new idea do not change

the facts in any particular. Even before they went to Osnome, Seaton was

hard to get, as you found out. On that trip he learned so much new stuff

that it is now impossible to kill him by any ordinary means. You should

realize that fact when he kills every gangster you send against him. At

all events be very, very careful not to kill his wife in any of your

attacks, even by accident, until after you have killed him."



"Such an event would be regrettable, certainly, in that it would remove

all possibility of the abduction."



"It would remove more than that. Remember the explosion in our

laboratory, that blew an entire mountain into impalpable dust? Draw in

your mind a nice, vivid picture of one ten times the size in each of our

plants and in this building. I know that you are fool enough to go ahead

with your own ideas, in spite of everything I've said; and, since I do

not yet actually control Steel, I can't forbid you to, officially. But

you should know that I know what I'm talking about, and I say again that

you're going to make an utter fool of yourself; just because you won't

believe anything possible, that hasn't been done every day for a hundred

years. I wish that I could make you understand that Seaton and Crane

have got something that we haven't--but for the good of our plants, and

incidentally for your own, please remember one thing, anyway; for if you

forget it, we won't have a plant left and you personally will be blown

into a fine red mist. Whatever you start, kill Seaton first, and be

absolutely certain that he is definitely, completely, finally and

totally dead before you touch one of Dorothy Seaton's red hairs. As long

as you only attack him personally he won't do anything but kill every

man you send against him. If you kill her while he's still alive,

though--Blooie!" and the saturnine scientist waved both hands in an

expressive pantomime of wholesale destruction.



"Probably you are right in that," Brookings paled slightly. "Yes, Seaton

would do just that. We shall be very careful, until after we succeed in

removing him."



"Don't worry--you won't succeed. I shall attend to that detail myself,

as soon as I get back. Seaton and Crane and their families, the

directors and employees of their plants, the banks that by any

possibility may harbor their notes or solutions--in short, every person

and everything standing between me and a monopoly of 'X'--all shall

disappear."



"That is a terrible program, Doctor. Wouldn't the late Perkins' plan of

an abduction, such as I have in mind, be better, safer and quicker?"



"Yes--except for the fact that it will not work. I've talked until I'm

blue in the face--I've proved to you over and over that you can't abduct

her now without first killing him, and that you can't even touch him. My

plan is the only one that will work. Seaton isn't the only one who

learned anything--I learned a lot myself. I learned one thing in

particular. Only four other inhabitants of either Earth or Osnome ever

had even an inkling of it, and they died, with their brains

disintegrated beyond reading. That thing is my ace in the hole. I'm

going after it. When I get it, and not until then, will I be ready to

take the offensive."



"You intend starting open war upon your return?"



"The war started when I tried to pick off the women with my attractor.

That is why I am leaving at midnight. He always goes to bed at

eleven-thirty, and I will be out of range of his object-compass before

he wakes up. Seaton and I understand each other perfectly. We both know

that the next time we meet one of us is going to be resolved into his

component atoms, perhaps into electrons. He doesn't know that he's going

to be the one, but I do. My final word to you is to lay off--if you

don't, you and your 'competent authorities' are going to learn a lot."



"You do not care to inform me more fully as to your destination or your

plans?"



"I do not. Goodbye."



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