"With what purpose?"
"Professor Milton has decided to divide the earth so that Russia can run her half while we—"
"Divide the earth!" exploded Professor Moreiko loudly, nearly damaging the telephone earpiece and Ingalls' ear at the same time. "You Americans!... He is yours! I will help, but you must stop him!"
"Okay," replied Ingalls. "Just keep an eye on the district I mentioned. According to the big globe here, that is the best place to divide the world so that each of us can have an equitable half—"
"And a precious lot it will do us," snorted Moreiko. "What a completely outrageous idea!"
"Well, I'm told he is the guy to do it."
Moreiko spluttered for a moment. Then his voice became sober. "Had any other man on earth made that statement I would have scoffed," he said. "But Professor Milton—American, I am alarmed!"
The connection was broken as the Russian hung up in an excited mood.
Days passed. Days in which men poured over shipping statements, pondering their relative importance and seeking some clue of strange shipments to a strange location. A huge airliner was stolen; the seismographs of the world were still save for their usual reportings; for three days all radio was killed by energetic cracklings of static which appeared to be completely non-directional in source. The Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington reported shiftings of the lines of equal deviation from true north and a change in the vertical component as well but their measurements were insufficiently precise to pin the source of trouble down to more than several thousand square miles.