I lost no time in getting Carpenter on the wire.
"Hello, First Mortgage," he greeted me. "You made good time getting down here. Where are you?"
"At the A. P. Office."
"Grab a taxi and come out to the laboratory. Bring your grip with you: you may have to stay over night."
"I'll be right out, Jim. What's the story?"
His voice suddenly grew grave.
"It's the biggest thing you ever handled," he replied. "The fate of the whole world may hang on it. I don't want to talk over the phone; come on out and I'll give you the whole thing."
An hour later I shook hands with Tim, the guard at the gate of the Carpenter laboratory, and passed through the grounds to enter Jim's private office. He greeted me warmly and for a few minutes we chatted of old times when I worked with him as an assistant in his atomic disintegration laboratory and of the stirring events we had passed through together when we had ventured outside the heaviside layer in his space ship.
"Those were stirring times," he said, "but I have an idea, First Mortgage, that they were merely a Sunday school picnic compared to what we are about to tackle."