Dusty groaned. He thought of the trackless wastes of the planet; the Upper Amazon jungles, the tundra of Alaska and Siberia, the hidden reaches of Africa, high Tibet, and for that matter the cornfields of Iowa and the wheat fields of Saskatchewan. The fathomless, staggering area of the sea bottoms was too vast a hopeless search-problem to contemplate.
Gant looked at Dusty. "It's bad, Dusty. I'll not fool you, but it's bad. We have perhaps a day or two, perhaps three. We're late. By the time we arrive, the phase-two growth will be heavy enough to cause leakage-reaction in our detector and render the detector completely ambiguous."
"Meaning what?"
"What I said. That we must scour Terra inch by inch. And here is where you must help."
"Me?"
"Yes. You must issue orders to your Space Patrol to comb the landscape. You must find that barytrine generator."
Dusty looked at Gant Nerley blankly. "You realize what you're asking? That within a matter of hours we must set up a land-scouring search and completely cover the entire earth? I haven't even got the foggiest notion of how many million square miles of earth there are, let alone the ocean-bottom which we couldn't even touch, lacking the equipment."
"They wouldn't plant it on a sea bottom."
"No? Look, Gant, remember that they're planning on keeping this thing running for a thousand years. They'll have to hide it good."