“No,” Myles signified with a shake of his head; then seizing the pad and stylus again, he wrote: “I will try and get Jud. You meanwhile attempt to extract magnesium from this piece of carnallite.”
The ant-man knew exactly how to proceed. Grinding the ore, he mixed it with salt and melted the mass in an iron pot, which he connected electrically with the carbon terminal of a line of electric batteries. In the boiling pot he placed a copper plate connected with the zinc elements of his cells.
By the time the earth-man returned from calling Jud on the radio, a coating of pure magnesium had begun to form on the copper anode.
An hour or so later he scraped off his first yield of the precious metal, the final necessity of his projected radio set.
At this stage Jud appeared. “Pardon the delay,” he started to explain. “You see, I—”
But Myles cut him short with: “Never mind explanations now. It is enough that you are here. Sur has fallen. The beasts of the south and Att the Terrible are on the warpath. They seek to rob you of your Arkilu. With their aerial wagons they will drop magic rocks upon this city and destroy it. Give Doggo back his plane, and he will try to combat them.”
But Jud shook his head. “You would merely escape,” he replied, “and then we would be worse off than now.”
“Then you admit that you know the whereabouts of Doggo’s plane?” Myles eagerly asked.
“Not at all, not at all,” the Vairking suavely replied. “I was merely stating that, even if I knew where this ‘plane,’ as you call it, is—”
“For Builder’s sake, man!” Cabot cut in. “This is no time to quibble over words! Give us the plane, if you would save Theoph, yourself, and Arkilu.”