"You certainly can, sir," Seaton made surprising answer. "We are so completely lost in space that without a great deal of material and of mechanical aid we shall never be able to return to, nor even to locate in space, our native Galaxy, to say nothing of our native planet."
A concerted gasp of astonishment was his reply, then he was assured in no uncertain terms that the resources of Valeron were at his disposal.
A certain amount of public attention had of course to be endured; but Seaton and Crane, pleading a press of work upon their new projectors, buried themselves in Radnor's laboratory, leaving it to their wives to bear the brunt of Valeronian adulation.
"How do you like being a heroine, Dot?" Seaton asked one evening, as the two women returned from an unusually demonstrative reception in another city.
"We just revel in it, since we didn't do any of the real work—it's just too perfectly gorgeous for words," Dorothy replied shamelessly. "Especially Peggy." She eyed Margaret mischievously and winked furtively at Seaton. "Why, you ought to see her—she could just simply roll that stuff up on a fork and eat it, as though it were that much soft fudge!"
Since the scientific and mechanical details of the construction of a fifth-order projector have been given in full elsewhere there is no need to repeat them here. Seaton built his neutronium lens in the core of the near-by white dwarf star, precisely as Rovol had done it from distant Norlamin. He brought it to Valeron and around it there began to come into being a duplicate of the immense projector which the Terrestrials had been obliged to leave behind them when they abandoned gigantic Skylark Three to plunge through the fourth dimension in tiny Two.
"Maybe it's none of my business, Radnor," Seaton turned to the Valeronian curiously during a lull in their work, "but how come you're still simply shooting away those Chloran vessels by making them put out their zones of force? Why didn't you hop over there on your projector and blow their whole planet over into the next Solar System? I would have done that long ago if it had been me, I think."
"We did visit Chlora once, with something like that in mind, but our attempt failed lamentably," Radnor admitted sheepishly. "You remember that peculiar special sense, that mental force that Siblin tried to describe to you? Well, it was altogether too strong for us. My father, possessing one of the strongest minds of Valeron, was in the chair, but they mastered him so completely that we had to recall the projection by cutting off the power to prevent them from taking from his mind by force the methods of transmission which you taught us and which we were then using."
"Hmm! So that's it, huh?" Seaton was greatly interested. "Maybe I'll take one on the chin, but I'm going to lock horns with that bunch of squidges myself, one of these days. When this projector gets itself done I'll skip over there and try them a whirl—with this fifth-order outfit I think maybe I'll be able to make big medicine on them."