The well-known technique of 'the big lie' was at work again. I had been given quarters with the Captain and we read the stuff through together, marvelling that anyone should find it worth printing.
'But I'm not a Jew,' said the Captain, bewilderedly.
'What do you think that matters?' I said. 'You're accused of an anti-Nazi plot, so you must be a Jew.'
'And how the hell do they think I did it? Don't they know that even under the best conditions you can't be sure within fifty miles either side where a derelict will fall?'
'Of course they know. But does the public? After all don't we spend a deuce of a lot of time trying to convince them of the accuracy and dependability of the Rocket Service?'
'Two-fifty thousand. H'm. It'd almost have been worth trying,' muttered the Captain.
The D.A.C.. accompanied by the Assistant Commissioner himself, came to visit us.
'Well,' he said, as his eye fell on the papers. 'They're out for your blood, aren't they? We've already had a demand from the Embassy for your extradition.'
'I'll sue them for libel.' said the Captain.
'In a German court?' asked the Assistant Commissioner, with a smile.
'But this stuff's all rot. They must know that,' I protested.
'Of course they do. But they're out to get you one way or another, aren't they?' he pointed to the sling which held the Captain's arm. 'The question is why?'
'It's absurd. A state doesn't revenge itself like that on individuals for what it knows must have been a pure accident,' I told him.
'Quite. I agree. So there must be another reason, mustn't there?'
'But what?'
'Have you forgotten the Excelsis's cargo? There was gold, they're very short of that.'
The Captain gave a snort. He showed signs of launching himself on one of his customary attacks on gold, but thought better of it.
'And there was ganywood—nearly as valuable. And there was a lot of tillfer fibre—how about that?'
It was an aspect which had not struck me before. Tillfer fibre under treatment produces Etherium, the lightest known gas; we used to use it in the wings of 'planes to give added lift, among other things. Since tillfer grows only on Ganymede and in limited quantities there, and also because there was an Anglo-American trade protectorate in force there, the Germans couldn't get it. It was one of the raw materials they felt sore about. Hard on them, of course, but how much would they have let us have if it had been their trade protectorate? That's an easy answer.
'So what?' I asked.
'I don't know. But suppose, just suppose, they would only hand over that cargo on condition you were turned over to them.'
'Would that do them any good?'
They could claim for their own people's benefit to have dealt with plotters as they should be dealt with.'
'Fantastic. Who's going to believe that?' the Captain asked.
The Assistant Commissioner shrugged his shoulders.
'Quite a lot of people if it's shouted loudly enough. The same kind of thing has worked often before. It's wonderful what they take.' He ruminated a few moments. 'They made a mess of 1914. They came a cropper in 1940. And now they're working up for it again. You know, when I look at them, I know just how Henry the Second must have seen Thomas à Becket.'
But the A.C. was wrong. Public indignation over the demand worked up quickly, and, as ever, concentrated in groups on various aspects: against the presumptuous belief that the handing over of British subjects to a foreign court could be tolerated for a moment: against the existence of any plot: against the feasibility of such an arrangement. The calmest partisans suggested that there should be a trial for the purpose of clearing us, but that it should be held in England where a sense of justice and not the good of the state could be relied on to produce a verdict.
The next day the situation was inflamed. Reports of the murder of Sinderton and the attempt on Captain Belford were published. We learned that the Embassy was still pressing for our extradition on the ground that we had, in dropping the derelict from no charted territory, committed an act of piracy which placed us beyond the protection of our government.
A news message from Germany went one better. The Excelsis, it said, carried no cargo. She was an empty hulk. This, they claimed, was substantiated by a member of the crew who had confessed that we had stopped at the Moon and hidden the cargo there before coming on to Earth.
The Captain and I gasped over this latest piece of effrontery. They had gone one better than the A.C.'s prophecy: they wanted both us and the cargo.
Well, maybe their own people believed that about the cargo, but it didn't go down too well over here at first. It takes civilised people quite a while to appreciate 'the big lie' technique.
It was queer, too, why we should bother to drop an empty hulk when it might have been full of explosives as they had previously claimed. But they didn't seem to bother about little points like that. It was years later that some journalist dug up the story of the treasure on the Moon and people began wondering about it.
At the time, the whole thing seemed to us to be just farcical. However, when the Assistant Commissioner came to see us once more it turned out to be not so humorous after all.
'They want you over there,' he said. 'You realise what that means. Execution. And more. Before you are condemned they'll have a confession out of you by some means that you stole the Excelsis's cargo and hid it on the Moon. They'll brand you as both pirates and criminals.
'We, naturally, have no wish to surrender you. But, and it is a big but, according to international law their claim is perfectly good. A person accused of engineering a crime in free space is eligible for trial in the country of the plaintiff.'
That was a facer. Naturally, until that moment, we had neither of us given serious consideration to the German claim.
'It puts us in an awkward position,' he went on, for all the world as if it didn't put us in a jam. 'It boils down to this. Either we must hand you over and connive at what we know to be injustice, or else we must commit a flagrant breach of international law.
'We have, I repeat, no wish to do the former. Yet, in our position can we do the latter?
'The Government is very worried over you two. You see, you have a political aspect, too, now. Foreign relations are none too easy; it's no time to flout international agreements. On the other hand, the party majority at home is none too stable. Any big popular outcry will almost certainly result in their losing the next election: and handing you over would raise an almighty shindy.'
I felt that if we were to be political counters it was extremely lucky that we had the feeling of the people with us.
'As I, and several who are much more influential than I, see it,' he went on, 'there is one remedy, and one only. You two are going to have to disappear.'
'Disappear?'
'Make an escape—preferably a spectacular escape—from custody.'
'I don't like that,' said the Captain. 'I'm a man with a clean record. I've done nothing I'm ashamed of. I ought to have a chance to clear myself.'
'Of course, you don't like it. Nor do we. But you'd like still less being made to sign a false confession.'
'Let them try to make me.'
'I'd rather not,' said the Assistant Commissioner. There was a lot of unpleasant suggestion in his voice. It took quite a time to din a full realisation of the position into the Captain, he was so satisfied with the clearness of his own innocence. It was an hour before we could get him to see the thing in the round, so to speak.