"What do you mean?" That was Cap McNeally.
"His suggestion. Heterodyning the web-coils, so we'll counter the H-layer radiation with an alternating current of our own. It's just about one chance in a million!"
"Then take that chance!" cried the skipper. "Try it! Do as he says. And, for God's sake, man, hurry!"
Cartaphilus, his eyes drained of all expression, rose sluggishly. Once more he spoke, faintly. "It will work," he said. "It will work, and I have failed again. And all because I would not let Him rest...."
His voice broke in a great, wrenching sob. Then he lurched from the control room like a broken thing.
I never saw him again. No one aboard the Antigone ever saw him again. For the next hour we were in a turmoil, rearranging the electrical units of the ship as Cartaphilus had told us. We finished our task just in time; scant seconds after we had thrown on the power we nosed into the web-like field of force which is the H-layer.
It was a breathless moment. Despite our efforts, there was not a man of us but expected a brief, brilliant instant of horror—then oblivion. But we were as wrong as Cartaphilus had been right. There was a jolt as our forcefield met that of Earth's shield; the permalloy hull of the ship sang and hummed and glowed cherry-red under the impact of that terrific electromotive strain, but we slipped through the barrier with greater ease than ever had any ship using the old style shield generators.
In our jubilation we quite forgot the mad scientist whose strange, last-minute change of mind had saved our lives. We landed. And sometime between the moment of landing and the moment when we remembered our passenger, he fled. Disappeared completely from the ship and from our lives.
Cap McNeally was nothing if not a square-shooter. He refused to take credit for the invention that had brought us through the H-layer. The patent rights were taken out in the name of our deranged passenger. The "Moran H-penetrant" it is called. All spaceships used it until just recently; until Cap Hawkins of the Andromeda and the Venusian scientist, Jar Farges, discovered Ampies could be used as H-layer shields.