Rick rubbed the rime of frozen atmosphere from a window, and they all peered out at a level waste, pale under the stars. Here at the center of the dark hemisphere, the deposit of congealed oxygen and nitrogen and water was so deep that it seemed even to have buried the mountains utterly. Perhaps the tower itself was on a mountain top. Even so, only its cupola projected above the desolation.
That and a row of gigantic pipe ends slanting upward from the super-frigid drifts. Their maws yawned black in the still bleakness.
For a moment the men almost forgot Fane, as they wondered what it was that they looked upon.
"Space ship launching tubes?" Finden suggested.
"I'm thinking of something else," Lattimer answered, his voice hollow and awed, yet somehow less tired.
"So am I," Rick put in. "I'm thinking of the breech-ends of these same tubes down below. And of an ordinary Fourth-of-July pinwheel made to spin by the tangential reaction of the gases of old fashioned gunpowder. And of what that screwball, Fane, muttered to himself. 'Give back a world.' Yeah. What was it that killed Mercury as a reasonably habitable planet?"
"I see what you mean," Finden growled. "Mercury stopped rotating. But about the rest you're absolutely nuts."
"Are we?" Lattimer challenged. "Does making a world rotate again, seem too big a job for a bank of atomic jets the size of these aimed just above the horizon? Those old Martians could have done it. And maybe our people could, too, allowing years of work and vast expenditure."
At that moment Rick Mills understood Frank Fane as never before.
"So this is supposed to be Fane's glory," Finden mused hoarsely, his eyes wide. "To give a ruined world back to civilization. Restore it. Not bad for an unknown pug-ugly even if the bug in his head says he has to kill everybody around and blame it on old war machines running amok by themselves so that there will be no division of triumph; so that, with all of us dopes dead, he'll look even bigger."