"Because of a little secret I never let him know," Garth replied, rubbing his nose and grinning wryly. "My wife is on Venus, where the plague can't reach her. And I promised myself days ago that Dollard should never be given the opportunity to infect that planet. That's one promise that has been kept. At least, I know now that Ellen will be safe—for a while longer."
"But, sir, the big boss has gone! What can you do—with him flown the coop?"
"Do now? I've already done it. Dollard thought of me as a fool, but instead—I've shown him up as the real fool. A simpleton, tricked by carelessness. There's a damned big surprise waiting for him in space."
Garth looked up into the twilight sky where a few brilliant stars were now shining. His face bore an expression of exultant triumph. "Yes," he said softly, "a real surprise is just around the next curve for you, Edwin Dollard. I hope you enjoy it as well as you've enjoyed buying and selling men's souls...."
ive hundred miles above the sun-mirroring Pacific Ocean, Dollard wiped great beads of perspiration from his shiny jowls. His thick hands tugged and wrestled with stubborn knobs that finally yielded, enabling him to apply greater thrust to his stern rockets.
From the moment of take-off, it had seemed to him that the grim bowl of Terra below him was taking a bigger bite out of his acceleration than it should. Naturally, he hadn't expected his craft to operate with one hundred per cent efficiency, considering the caliber of the technical help employed on its refitting; but still, his tau curve should have brought him to his first coasting point four or five minutes earlier.
By virtue of being his own pilot, he was obliged to astrogate by rule-of-thumb and occasional directive spurts from the course-calculator. If mechanical troubles piled on top of him now, he'd have to surrender control to his gyromatic pilot, while he moved aft to track down the power-robbing malfunction. No mean task, armed in this case only with a slide rule and what engineering knowledge remained to him after thirty years of high finance.
Whatever the gremlin was, it wasn't exactly an auspicious start for a fifty million-mile hop. He grunted and pressed his secondary firing buttons, boosting space velocity by a percentage that should shake the kinks out.