"I wonder—" said Morey thoughtfully. "Arcot, those people were obviously warned against our attack—probably by that other city. Now, we've come nearly halfway around this world; certainly we couldn't have gone much farther away and still be on the planet. And we find this city in league with the other! Since this league goes halfway around the world, and they expected us to do the same, isn't it fair to assume, just on the basis of geographical location, that all this world is in one league?"
"Hmmm—an interplanetary war," mused Arcot. "That would certainly prove that one of the other planets is inhabited. The question is—which one?"
"The most probable one is the next inner planet, Aphrodite," replied Morey.
Arcot fired the ship into the sky. "If your conclusions are correct—and I think they are—I see no reason to stay on this planet. Let's go see if their neighbors are less aggressive!"
With that, he shot the ship straight up, rotating the axis until it was pointing straight away from the planet. He increased the acceleration until, as they left the outer fringes of the atmosphere, the ship was hitting a full four gravities.
"I'm going to shorten things up and use the space control," Arcot said. "The gravitational field of the sun will drain a lot of our energy out, but so what? Lead is cheap, and before we're through, we'll have plenty or I'll know the reason why!"
Dr. Richard Arcot was angry—boiling all the way through!
XV
There was the familiar tension in the air as the space field built up and they were hurled suddenly forward; the star-like dot of the planet suddenly expanded as they rushed forward at a speed far greater than that of light. In a moment, it had grown to a disc; Arcot stopped the space control. Again they were moving forward on molecular drive.