But Carroll's experiments with his new teleport seemed innocuous enough. For several days he fiddled with the tuning and synchronizing controls that were used to tune one teleport to the other.
He kept constantly 'ON' the switch that remotely operated any distant teleport that his own happened to be tuned to but his work did very little good. He found the two that were sealed in the tiny room and knew them for what they were. Carroll was seeking the teleports of the aliens.
For days he searched the—subspace?—for the alien teleports and found none. Then in a desperate measure, Carroll finally went through to the room in the Lawson Laboratory and, using some of his store of tools, broke the sealed door.
Brashly Carroll stole an automobile. Equally rash, he drove at breakneck speed along the roads that led him up into the Virginia mountains along the back-path that he had traversed only once before in a conscious condition, and then from the opposite direction with Rhinegallis pointing out the way.
It took many hours before he came to the little side-road that led like a mountain goat's retreat up into the top hills. It changed from a side-road to a mere trail and then branched from a mere trail to an unkempt, rutted footpath that jounced the automobile terribly.
Miles along this rocky path, Carroll turned into a clearing—a well-remembered clearing, and he looked across it—in surprise. The building itself was gone! No wonder he could find no teleports!
And the words of Kingallis returned to him. "You won't live long enough!" the alien had said. "The universe isn't big enough for both of us!"
The rats had deserted the doomed ship!
It was so pat—so perfect! Now they would say that there never had been any aliens. At every turn Carroll was blocked and stopped and frustrated. How long the aliens had been guarding Terra he did not know. Perhaps about the time that the Lawson Radiation was discovered, or perhaps even before.
No matter how good they were at intercepting things, the aliens could not keep some things from leaking out. They might have been here for centuries awaiting the man Lawson who was the discoverer.