DuQuesne and Brookings met in conference in a private room of the Perkins Café.
"What's the good word, Doctor?"
"So-so," replied the scientist. "The stuff is all they said it was, but we haven't enough of it to build much of a power-plant. We can't go ahead with it, anyway, as long as Seaton and Crane have nearly all their original solution."
"No, we can't. We must find a way of getting it. I see now that we should have done as you suggested, and taken it before they had warning and put it out of our reach."
"There's no use holding post-mortems. We've got to get it, some way, and everybody that knows anything about that new metal, how to get it or how to handle it, must die. At first, it would have been enough to kill Seaton. Now, however, there is no doubt that Crane knows all about it, and he probably has left complete instructions in case he gets killed in an accident—he's the kind that would. We will have to keep our eyes open and wipe out those instructions and anyone who has seen them. You see that, don't you?"
"Yes, I am afraid that is the only way out. We must have the monopoly, and anyone who might be able to interfere with it must be removed. How has your search for more X prospered?"
"About as well as I expected. We bought up all the platinum wastes we could get, and reworked all the metallic platinum and allied metals we could buy in the open market, and got less than a gram of X out of the whole lot. It's scarcer than radium. Seaton's finding so much of it at once was an accident, pure and simple—it couldn't happen once in a million years."
"Well, have you any suggestions as to how we can get that solution?"
"No. I haven't thought of anything but that very thing ever since I found that they had hidden it, and I can't yet see any good way of getting it. My forte is direct action and that fails in this case, since no amount of force or torture could make Crane reveal the hiding-place of the solution. It's probably in the safest safe-deposit vault in the country. He wouldn't carry the key on him, probably wouldn't have it in the house. Killing Seaton or Crane, or both of them, is easy enough, but it probably wouldn't get us the solution, as I have no doubt that Crane has provided for everything."