The fleet circled Terra once more, swung high for the long dive, and then came howling down on a long slant, while Dusty took the radio and cried: "Junior Spacemen of The Space Patrol, Attention!"
The radio, powered by machinus forces, hammered down and blanketed the radio broadcast stations. It broke up the video screens in a mash of spots, flecks and snowflakes. Dusty's voice roared into telephone lines and onto the commercial radio links and chattered indistinctly in direction-finding equipment and made incomprehensible squiggles clutter the radar screens.
"Junior Spacemen, Attention to Official Orders! By now you are aware that your Commander, Dusty Britton, flies with a fleet of spacecraft above you. Now hear this!
"Within a few hundred miles of the lower tip of Lake Michigan there is concealed somewhere a dangerous device known as a barytrine generator. This must be located and stopped.
"Now! To the Junior Spaceman who locates this machine I will personally award the Medal of Merit. And to the entire Group Command of which he is a member I will award full scholarships as Space Midshipmen in a real Space Academy, to make them real spacemen.
"Now, Junior Spacemen, go out and find me that barytrine generator!"
Dusty signed off as the down-rushing fleet swaybacked close to the ground and pulled out to swap ends and go screaming up in a stark vertical climb, its drivers fighting the rise to a standstill fifty miles in the sky.
Here they hovered for a second to turn rightside up and then the flight formed into a pattern and began to land, coming down slowly.
Before they were halfway down, Dusty saw results. In the telescope were moving dots scouring the landscape. And along highways that led from town and city were boys on bicycles and a few in cars driven by parents. Across the fields they went, peering under trees and behind bushes, scouring the cornfields and the farms and stamping through woodsy sections like swarming ants.
But then as the flight landed in a neat pattern in a bald field, the barytrine detector hissed once and gave up, smoke curling out of the cabinet.