"Everything is against me in my great task. Everything!” he cried with theatrical self-pity. “But I shall persevere and conquer in spite of everything! The system shall see!"
"Perhaps the girl has given away the secret to the psychophone by now, sir,” Jenk Cheerly suggested hastily. “Shall I examine the record?"
Trask nodded curtly. The fat spymaster reached up and touched a switch of the recorder. Instantly from it, began speaking the recorded thoughts of Lana, as spoken by the psychophone in the preceding hours and phonographically recorded on the tape.
John Thorn soundlessly opened the door behind which he and his comrades were hidden, and whispered tautly to them,
"Come on, but don't shoot Trask, yet!"
Haskell Trask and Cheerly were so intently listening to the record that they did not see the armed Planeteers appear silently at the open door of the cell. But the captain saw, and uttered a startled cry. Trask and the fat spymaster spun around.
"Hands high!” John Thorn rapped, his atom-pistol leveled. “Quick, or we'll blast you down!"
Stupefiedly, the three men in the cell raised their hands. Haskell Trask's bony face went livid with rage.
"You dare turn weapons upon me!” he choked to the disguised Planeteers. “Upon me, your Leader!"
But Cheerly's pig eyes suddenly widened as the fat spymaster's gaze searched Thorn's green-stained face.