Timmy grinned. "Not quite, pal," he said, "I'm figuring on something just a little more effective." He took a piece of paper and made a few hasty sketches. Johnny Damokles watched with interest. Then he broke into a smile.
"I see," nodded the Greek. "She are just like story I tell you about old Greek king."
"Exactly.... And now, let me have time enough to get rid of our scrap of test metal and we'll turn in."
"No," protested Damokles. "Give me this piece impervium. I got good idea. Secret."
Timmy, without further question, handed Johnny the bit of treated impervium and added to it his bottle of stolen liquid. "Good night, chum," he mumbled, and rolled over to sleep.
Ten days and ten nights passed in that way. Each night Timmy had another flask of his sensitizer to give Johnny. And each night Damokles reported another successful application of the fluid. Miraculous that the two of them could so successfully hoodwink their captors? Yes. But then the Neptunians thought of the two as members of a lesser race, and gave them almost complete freedom of movement ... within limits. Timmy blessed the arrogance from which this stemmed. From the photo-labs he stole his sensitizer. In the mech labs he succeeded in removing and assembling certain vital cogs and rheostats. Put together they would give him control of Neptune's gigantic dynotron bomb. And Timmy Gordon was the man to put any machinery together. He did it on the tenth day. That same day, he stole a length of steel chain and a sharpened metal hook. Why he stole them, Timmy Gordon didn't know. But Damokles had asked him to, and he'd given his promise.
"Here you are," he said when he reached their room that night. He slipped the hook and chain to Johnny beneath the covers of their bed. "Goin' fishin' with it, chum?"
"You bet your dam' boots. I catch fat fish, too."
Timmy smiled. Then, quietly, he showed Johnny Damokles the piece of apparatus he'd constructed. It looked somewhat like the primitive 20th Century radio sets one saw in museums, but its purpose, as Tim explained, was more important. Compact, weighing no more than fifty or sixty grams, it gave him complete radio control of anything treated with his sensitizing fluid. What was more important, it took its power from almost any faint source of light, and should be effective up to two or three thousand miles.