“Why does he work day and night to convince people that he’s a heel?” Ralph contributed.
“Quiz thinks there’s something wrong with the football stories he’s always telling,” said Sandy.
“All right,” Donovan went on thoughtfully. “I suggest that a lot of the things Cavanaugh is doing are meant to be camouflage. He’s throwing up some sort of smoke screen to get people confused about his true intentions. And, since we’re the ones most likely to get hurt by whatever he’s really up to, I also think we had better do a little investigating. Does either of you have any suggestions?”
“If he were sending up smoke signals instead of talking on a light beam, I’ll bet I could soon find out,” the Indian said.
“That’s an excellent idea, Ralph.” The geologist fired up his pipe and sent clouds of smoke billowing through the crowded lab. “Eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves, they say. Nevertheless, I think we should fight fire with fire by listening in on him and learning the worst.”
“But how can we listen in?” Sandy objected. “Even if we got high enough to intercept his beam—in a helicopter, let’s say—he would know something had gone wrong when his receiving station didn’t reply. He’d stop talking.”
“There’s another way to go about it,” Donovan replied. “I’m a pretty good geophysicist as well as a geologist, Sandy. I have to be out here, where I may go out looking for oil and find a uranium lode if I keep my eyes peeled and my Geiger counter turned on.
“Over on that table—” he nodded toward a small electric furnace and a collection of retorts, chemicals and test tubes on one corner of his work bench—“I have equipment so sensitive that I can burn the branch of a pine tree, or even a bunch of loco weed and find out whether the roots of that tree or weed reach down into a uranium ore deposit. With it, I can detect in the ash as little as one part in a million of any radioactive ore the plant has sucked up from underground in its sap. Which reminds me that any time you run across a patch of loco weed, let me know immediately. The poisonous stuff seems to like to grow on ground in the vicinity of uranium.
“All right. Any physicist understands the principles of electronics, the properties of light, and so on, doesn’t he?”
Sandy nodded with growing excitement.