Kingston shrugged. "Y'know," he said quietly, "if it does ruin Earth Three nothing says that you and I can't pass over ourselves anyway."
Maddox smiled. "Indubitably," he agreed dryly. It was quite obvious that Leader Kingston had given him nothing new in ideas.
Unlike the slow space resonator of Earth Two, the ones used on Earth Three went with lightning swiftness. They were smaller, more efficient, showed a deeper grasp of the art and the principles involved. Maddox picked his collection of equipment up and headed for the door.
"What are you going to use for a focal volume?" demanded Kingston. "You have no focal point."
"Won't need one," smiled Maddox. "That's a true atomic flame. As in the sun there will be minute traces of all elements contained therein and all we need is a trace. For like the sun, Earth Two's atomic flame is both building up and tearing down all elements possible. Come on—I'll prove my point."
For a brief time, Harry Maddox drove like a maniac through the air in his atom-powered speedster. Leaving behind it the whistling scream of its supersonic passage from Albuquerque to Alamogordo, the fleet craft made the passage in minutes. At the site of the original, Maddox landed.
There on the desert was the steel tower that had held the Alamogordo Bomb before its trial. On Earth One there was but a shallow depression of broken green—glazed sand. On Earth Two there burned a pillar of atomic fire for miles in radius from this very spot. Here Maddox set up his space resonator.
Then, sensibly, he urged Kingston back into the speedster and raced away, ten, fifteen miles. Then in his speedster Maddox pressed a button.
Behind them on the desert a burst of intolerable light, like a million suns compressed into a minute sphere, cast its instantaneous glare across the face of the earth. Like an expanding hemisphere of pure sun-flame, it dinned against the very substance of space and hurled its terrible energy outward.