"Sorry," said Farradyne with a smile. "I didn't mean to include you, Walter."
Carolyn said, in a self-confident voice, "Brenner is one of us. He is just as willing to die for our cause as—" She suddenly remembered the truckmen present, who were probably as puzzled as men can be over the trend of conversation. But she didn't have to finish. Farradyne realized with a start that the enemy culture and training must include a high degree of blind patriotism which demanded that the agent in danger of discovery must be ready to eliminate his discoverer even though it cause the death of both of them. The Semiramide—
A searchlight swept across the lake and its light, refracted downward from the waves, caught Farradyne's eye. He left them in the salon and raced up the stairs to the control room. Through the astrodome, distorted by the water, Farradyne could see the headlamps of a big truck. The searchbeam crossed the water again and flashed ever so briefly on the slender rod of the antenna. The truck paused in its course, the beam swept the woody shore and stopped; the truck turned toward something in the woods and rumbled off through the trees.
The radio music died again. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to bring you a very startling program. John Bundy, our special events newscaster, has joined the forces scouring the Lake Superior region for Charles Farradyne. Inasmuch as an early arrest is expected, and possibly a running gun battle, John Bundy will take the air with an on-the-spot account. Come in, John Bundy!"
"Hello, this is John Bundy! Our convoy of trucks, men, guns, radar and radio control resembles a war convoy. We have everything from trench knives to one-fifty-five rifles aboard as we scour the northwoods for the criminal who has been so successful up to this time. We arrived at a point along Lake Superior which must be close to Farradyne's operations, according to the description given to us by the arrested truck driver. Sand and mud from Miss Hannon's shoes correspond to that district.
"Flying above us now are eight squadron bombers carrying heavy depth charges because Farradyne is believed to be hiding his spacecraft in the waters of the Lake. A submarine from the Great Lakes Geodetic Survey has been hastily equipped with some ranging sonar from the War Museum at Chicago and is seeking the submerged spacecraft. It—"
There came a distant crash in the radio and seconds afterward the Lancaster resounded with the thunder of an underwater explosion.
"One of the depth charge patterns has been dropped," explained Bundy excitedly. "Perhaps this is—no, it's not. Sorry. Just a hope, but the submarine has just covered the explosion area and reported only an underwater mountain peak instead of a hidden spacecraft. No place will be left unsearched—"
A thin, pure ping of a pitch so high it was on the upper limit of Farradyne's ability to hear came and lasted for less than a tenth of a second. It came again in about twenty seconds, repeating at like intervals again and again. The interval dropped; the volume of the ping increased noticeably until the singing tinkle, something like tapping a silver table knife on Haviland china, was coming fast.
Ping! Ping! Ping!