"It might, at that," Crane conceded, after minutes of narrow-eyed concentration; then, Crane-wise, began to muster objections. "But it would not so affect this vessel. She is altogether too large, is of the wrong shape, and—"
"And you can't pull yourself up by your own boot straps," Seaton interrupted. "Right—you've got to have something to work from, something to anchor your forces to. We'd make the trip in little old Skylark Two. She's small, she's spherical, and she has so little mass compared to Three that rotating her out of space would be a lead-pipe cinch—it wouldn't even shift Three's reference planes."
"It might prove successful," Crane admitted at last, "and, if so, it could not help but be a very interesting and highly informative experience. However, the chance of success seems to be none too great, as you have said, and we must exhaust every other possibility before we decide to attempt it."
For hours then the two scientists went over every detail of their situation, but could evolve no other plan which held out even the slightest gleam of hope for a successful outcome; and Seaton seated himself before the banked and tiered keyboards of his projector.
There he worked for perhaps half an hour, then called to Crane: "I've got everything set to spin Two out to where we're going, Mart. Now if you and Shiro"—for Crane's former "man" and the Skylark's factotum was now quite as thoroughly familiar with Norlaminian forces as he had formerly been with Terrestrial tools—"will put some forces onto the job of getting her ready for anything you think we may meet up with, I'll put in the rest of the time trying to figure out a way of taking a good stiff poke at those jaspers out there."
He knew that the zones of force surrounding his vessel were absolutely impenetrable to any wave propagated through the ether, and to any possible form of material substance. He knew also that the sub-ether was blocked, through the fifth and sixth orders. He knew that it was hopeless to attempt to solve the problem of the seventh order in the time at his disposal.
If he were to open any of his zones, even for an instant, in order to launch a direct attack, he knew that the immense mentalities to which he was opposed would perceive the opening and through it would wreak the Terrestrials' dematerialization before he could send out a single beam.
Last and worst, he knew that not even his vast console afforded any combination of forces which could possibly destroy the besieging intellectuals. What could he do?
For hours he labored with all the power of his wonderful brain, now stored with all the accumulated knowledge of thousands upon thousands of years of Norlaminian research. He stopped occasionally to eat, and once, at his wife's insistence, he snatched a little troubled and uneasy sleep; but his mind drove him back to his board and at that board he worked. Worked—while the hands of the chronometer approached more and ever more nearly the zero hour. Worked—while the Skylark's immense stores of uranium dwindled visibly away in the giving up of their inconceivable amounts of intra-atomic energy to brace the screens which were dissipating the inexhaustible flood of cosmic force being directed against them. Worked—in vain. At last he glanced at the chronometer and stood up. "Twenty minutes now—time to go," he announced. "Dot, come here a minute!"