Rex's square face was set into a disinterested mold. He looked Carl up and down, shrugged. "Sure, I'll talk. But it won't do any good, Carl. It's already fixed. Nothing you can do can change it. And it's funny you picked out today to check up on me."
"Just today?" Carl asked hollowly.
"Just today." Rex spoke so calmly it was as if all the acid bitterness in him had been alkalized in one moment. For the first time in many months, he was a kid again, without a secret thought, without an equivocation on his lips.
Rex said, "There's two hundred thousand tons of merbohydrates out there, Carl. It's taken me two years to manufacture the stuff. The most powerful explosive ever invented.
"You see, Carl, I wasn't as crazy as you thought when I said I was going to send up a distress signal. It's a matter of nine or ten hours. And you can't stop it."
Carl stood with eyes closed, muscles iron-hard. "Rex," he said, "give me the position coordinates of that two hundred thousand tons of merbohydrate."
Rex gave him the coordinates. Carl set the ship on a slightly different course. An hour passed. The Wortan sun grew until it was a red globe glued to space.
Carl operated the photo-amplifiers, set the telescopic perilens into position. Space expanded. In the vision plate grew a tiny dot that seemed to rush rapidly into sight though it was still several hundred thousand miles away. It resolved itself into detail—countless neatly stacked and baled ingots of merbohydrate, each bale in turn attached to another by short lengths of wire. The mass was a thirty-foot cube.
