"There, we're all set!" In the control room of the Skylark Seaton laid aside his helmet and wiped the perspiration from his forehead in sheer relief. "The trap is baited and ready to spring—I've been scared to death for a week that they'd tackle us before we were ready for them."
"What difference would it have made?" asked Margaret curiously. "Since we have our sixth-order screens out they couldn't hurt us, could they?"
"No, Peg; but keeping them from hurting us isn't enough—we've got to capture 'em. And they'll have to be almost directly between Rovol's ship and ours to make that capture possible. You see, we'll have to send out from each vessel a hollow hemisphere of force and surround them. If we had only one ship, or if they don't come between our two ships, we can't bottle them up, because they have exactly the same velocity of propagation that our own forces have.
"Also, you can see that our projector can't work direct on more than a hemisphere without cutting its own beams, and that we can't work through relay stations because, fast as relays are, the Intellectuals would get away while the relays were cutting in. Any more questions?"
"Yes; I have one," put in Dorothy. "You told us that this artificial brain of yours could do anything that your own brain could think of, and here you've got it stuck already and have to have two of them. How come?"
"Well, this is a highly exceptional case," Seaton replied. "What I said would be true ordinarily, but now, as I explained to Peg, it's working against something that can think and act just as quickly as it can."
"I know, dear, I was just putting you on the spot a little. What are you using for bait?"
"Thoughts. We're broadcasting them from a point midway between the two vessels. They're keen on investigating any sixth-order impulses they feel, you know—that's why we've kept all our stuff on tight beams heretofore, so that they probably couldn't detect it—so we're sending out a highly peculiar type of thought, that we are pretty sure will bring them in from wherever they are."
"Let me listen to it, just for a minute?" she pleaded.
"W-e-l-l—I don't know." He eyed her dubiously. "Not for a minute—no. Being of a type that not even a pure intellectual can resist, they'd burn out any human brain in mighty short order. Maybe you might for about a tenth of a second, though."