He felt Fran's body turn in pain, and he saw that Fran's eyes looked up at stars, and the stars were cut off at one side by the curving bulk of the monstrous concrete dam.
Soames shook hands with himself. He let go the button. He started the motorcycle. He raced toward the dam. He did not again press on the sensory device until he'd gone frantically through the village and hair-raisingly down the truck-road to the generator buildings. There he cut off the motor, and he heard men's voices, profane and agitated and alarmed. He saw the small flickerings of flashlights.
He found Fran, crumpled on the ground and trying desperately not to make sounds of pain. Soames knew where the hurt was. He'd experienced it as Fran did. He'd guessed its cause and seriousness. He knew he had to move quickly.
He put Fran swiftly on the saddle behind his own on the motorcycle. He gave the motorcycle all the gas it would take and went racketing up the truck-road from the chasm below the dam.
He made it. The motorcycle, its lights turned off, was across the dam and streaking for the first curve beyond before the flickerings of car headlights began to show on the road from Bluevale.
Fran held on fiercely. But presently Soames felt the quiverings behind him. He stopped the motorcycle where the road was empty. Fran ground his teeth and stared at him defiantly in the reflected light of the now functioning single headlight.
"If I were you," said Soames, not expecting to be understood, but speaking as one man to another, "If I were you I wouldn't be ashamed of crying. I feel pretty much like it myself, from relief that your signalling device blew out."
CHAPTER 9
The color of the blue-green flame which had flared so fiercely outside the generator-buildings was no mystery at all. It was the color of vaporized copper, the same coloring found in burning driftwood in which copper nails have rusted. Its cause was no mystery, either. There'd been a gigantic short-circuit where the main power-leads left the dynamo-rooms to connect with cross-country power lines.
Soames and Fran knew directly, and some few security officers guessed, that Fran had caused the short. There was melted-down, cryptic metal below the place where the short appeared. Fran had undoubtedly placed it. How he escaped electrocution the security officers did not try to figure out. But they knew he'd tried to do something with apparatus that burned itself out without operating, and that he'd tumbled down a ten-foot drop while fleeing from the searing green arc, and even that he'd appealed for help with the words, "Try! Try! Try!" And they knew that somebody had helped him get away from the scene of his exploit and injury. But they didn't know how, nor that it was Soames.
Soames was assumed to be on his way East to confer with a group of scientists who now had added certain skilled instrument-makers to their number and triumphantly worked themselves to twitching exhaustion.
Fran's part in the affair was naturally a secret. Lights and power in five Colorado counties went off and stayed off. Local newspapers printed indignant editorials.
Theirs was a strictly local view. In high official quarters the feeling was quite different. The reaction there was more like paralyzed horror. Fran was known to be behind the breakdown of the plant. He'd caused it by trying to tap its lines for a monstrous amount of power. He'd been trying to signal to so great a distance that tens of thousands of kilowatts were required. He'd failed, but the high brass knew with absolute certainty that he'd tried to signal to his own race. And to the high brass this meant that he'd tried to summon a space-fleet with invincible weapons to the conquest of Earth.
So there were two directives from the highest possible policy-making levels. First, Fran must be caught at any cost in effort, time, money, and man-power. Second, the rest of the world must not know that one of the four spaceship's crew members was at large.
So the hunt for Fran intensified to a merciless degree.
Soames headed north. He wore a leather jacket, and he rode a battered, second-hand motorcycle, and on the saddle behind him an obvious kid brother rode, leather-jacketed as Soames was, capped as he was, scowling as Soames did, and in all ways imitating his elder. Which was so familiar a sight that nobody noticed Fran at all. He was visibly a tough younger brother of the kind of young man who goes in for battered motorcycles because he can't afford anything better. Naturally no one suspected him of being a telepathic monster, a creature of space, or the object of a desperate search.
It was helpful that Soames was not missed at first and was not searched for. It was a full day after the Navajo Dam breakdown before anybody thought to have him check on the melted-down apparatus. It was two days before anybody was concerned about him, and three before flights out of Denver had been checked futilely for his name.
But on the fourth day after a green flame reached up toward the sky, Soames and a silent, scowling, supposed younger brother occupied a fishing-shack on the shores of Calumet Lake. They were seven hundred miles from Denver, and the way they'd come was much longer than that. They were far removed from the tumult of the world. They'd made bivouacs in the open on the journey, and this would be the first time they'd settled anywhere long enough to take stock.
"Now," said Soames, as sunset-colorings filled the sky beyond the lake's farther edge, "now we figure out what we're going to do. We ought to be able to do something, though I don't yet know what. And first we act the parts we're playing. We came here to catch some fish. You shouldn't be able to wait. So we go out and catch fish for our dinner."
He led the way to a tiny wharf where a small boat lay tied. He carried fishing-rods and bait.
He untied the boat and rowed out to the middle of the lake. He surveyed his surroundings and dropped anchor. He baited a hook, with Fran watching intently.
Soames handed him the rod. Fran waited. He imitated Soames' actions when Soames began to fish. He watched his line as closely as the deepening dusk permitted.
"Hmmm," said Soames. "Your ankle's doing all right. Lucky it was a wrench instead of a break or a sprain. Four days of riding and no walking have fixed it pretty well. It's fairly certain nobody knows where you are, too. But where do we go from here?"
Fran listened.
"You came out of time," said Soames vexedly. "But time-travel can't be done. The natural law of the conservation of matter and energy requires that the total of substance and force in the cosmos, taken together, be the same at each instant that it was in the instant before and the one after. It's self-evident. That rules out travelling in time."
He jerked at his fishing-rod. He did not hook his fish.
"I don't think you understand me," he observed.
"No," said Fran matter of factly.
"It doesn't matter," Soames told him. "I'm saying that you can't put a gallon of water in a full keg of wine. And you can't, unless you draw off wine as fast as you add water. Unless you exchange. So you can't shift an object from time-frame A to time-frame B without shifting a corresponding amount of matter and energy from time-frame B to time-frame A. Unless you keep the amount of matter and energy unchanged in each. Unless you exchange. So you came to here and now from there and then—your home time-frame, let's say—by a process of swapping. By transposition. By replacement. Transposition's the best word. The effect was time-travel but the process wasn't, like a telephone has the effect of talking at a distance but the method is distinctly something else."
Fran jerked his fishing-rod. A nine-inch lake-trout flapped in the boat's bottom.
"I'm supposed to be teaching you how to fish!" said Soames.
He watched as Fran rather gingerly extracted the hook and rebaited as he'd seen Soames do.