Maybe, after all, the wisdom of the Forbidden Moon was too big for the human race. Maybe they would have to grow themselves first, advance in evolution, before they would know how to handle and how to win real benefits from such wisdom.
"All right, Nero," Harwich growled contemptuously to Bayley. "I'll grant that you're in the driver's seat, ready to stop nowhere. Building a space fleet and all. But where is Clara Arnold?"
The patrol pilot asked the question with fear and doubt in his heart.
"Clara Arnold?" said Bayley almost casually. "Too damned clever for a girl! Said she thought I might have had something to do with the crackup of the RQ257. Said she was worried about Paul and you, too, Harwich, being maybe stranded still alive here on Io. But she said that she'd finally decided my promises weren't good for anything, anyway. That I'd have to rescue you two men first before she'd believe in me. Until then, our engagement was off."
Harwich felt a brief wave of elation, as he heard these words. Clara had seemed so quiet and timid; but she'd evidently proved herself plenty courageous and plenty smart.
"But where is she?" Harwich growled angrily. "Now, I mean!"
"Don't get excited," Bayley sneered. "She came to the Forbidden Moon with me, hoping to see you and the kid again. I left her locked in my rocket. But she can't mean much to me any more now! Not when they begin to hear about me all over the solar system! Just a passing fancy! I suppose I might just as well have the machines bring her here now, to see just how completely helpless you two dopes are!"
Harwich and Paul Arnold were still pinioned to the floor by the automatons; but in the patrol pilot's slitted eyes glowed the subdued light of murder, futilely smoldering. The fat printer was absolutely master now of Clara, the boy, and himself. In his stupid, cruel, shallow vanity, cosmic power the deeper secrets of which he could never have understood, had driven Bayley to madness; to megalomania. That clanging and that red glow from near the distant hills showed the extent of his ambitions beyond question. The slave machines were not building that colossal fleet of space warships for nothing! Armed with weapons beyond human knowledge, such a fleet would sweep in aggressive fury to even the remotest world within the field of the sun's gravity!
But Harwich's feelings changed briefly to relief, when Clara Arnold was brought into the Tower room by another of those metal slaves. The automaton removed from her a flexible, transparent covering, of evidently airtight material, a protection against the rarity of the Ionian atmosphere, probably, for in being taken from the airlock of Bayley's rocket to the air-conditioned Tower here, she would otherwise have been exposed to suffocation.