Alan pulled the lever which controlled the outer door of the airlock. General Olmstead found his final resting place in the deep void of space where he had spent most of his life in the service of his fellow men.
CHAPTER VI
"Five hundred thousand miles out from Earth," Laura said, two weeks later.
"I still don't get it," Alan admitted. "They didn't even try to follow us. It's as if Keifer suddenly didn't care whether we escaped to Earth or not."
"Maybe he believes we're going to have our hands full trying to get Earth to repair the space-warp. Maybe he knows we won't be able to bother him or interfere with his plans."
But Alan shook his head, his brow creasing into a frown. "No that's not it. I just can't figure it." He walked to the fore viewport and gazed at the legions of stars against the black velvet immensity of space. In the upper right hand corner of the viewport he could see the Earth-moon system, the larger sphere pale green, mottled with white and brown, the smaller a dazzling white. He realized all at once that he had two homes. The Mars of his boyhood, the Earth and New Washington University, where he had spent his young manhood. He could never forsake one for the other. He was as much of Earth as he was of Mars, the verdant green richness of the one tugging at him with no less force than the arid, wild frontier of the other.
"See if you can get anything on the radio," he told Laura. The warp ship's receiver was a small one not meant for interplanetary distances, but Alan guessed it could pick up the more powerful Earth stations beamed to space through the Heavyside Layer.
The radio squawked and whistled, then they heard an announcer's voice faintly. "... of Alan Tremaine's Federation forces. All Earth is still shocked over Tremaine's ultimatum. The International Security Council has been meeting in closed session for two days now, with no announced decisions.
"Authoritative sources close to the Council say that President Holland has admitted the Earth is helpless. It has been known for more than a century that man's science was capable of building a cobalt bomb which, with a weight of perhaps four hundred tons, could poison all life on Earth with radioactivity.