was no mystery, either. There'd been
a gigantic short-circuit where the main power-leads left the
dynamo-rooms to connect with cross-country power lines.

Soames and Fran knew directly, and some few security officers guessed,
that Fran had caused the short. There was melted-down, cryptic metal
below the place where the short appeared. Fran had undoubtedly placed
it. How he escaped electrocution the security officers did not try to
figure out. But they knew he'd tried to do something with apparatus that
burned itself out without operating, and that he'd tumbled down a
ten-foot drop while fleeing from the searing green arc, and even that
he'd appealed for help with the words, "Try! Try! Try!" And they knew
that somebody had helped him get away from the scene of his exploit and
injury. But they didn't know how, nor that it was Soames.

Soames was assumed to be on his way East to confer with a group of
scientists who now had added certain skilled instrument-makers to their
number and triumphantly worked themselves to twitching exhaustion.

Fran's part in the affair was naturally a secret. Lights and power in
five Colorado counties went off and stayed off. Local newspapers printed
indignant editorials.

Theirs was a strictly local view. In high official quarters the feeling
was quite different. The reaction there was more like paralyzed horror.
Fran was known to be behind the breakdown of the plant. He'd caused it
by trying to tap its lines for a monstrous amount of power. He'd been
trying to signal to so great a distance that tens of thousands of
kilowatts were required. He'd failed, but the high brass knew with
absolute certainty that he'd tried to signal to his own race. And to the
high brass this meant that he'd tried to summon a space-fleet with
invincible weapons to the conquest of Earth.

So there were two directives from the highest possible policy-making
levels. First, Fran must be caught at any cost in effort, time, money,
and man-power. Second, the rest of the world must not know that one of
the four spaceship's crew members was at large.

So the hunt for Fran intensified to a merciless degree.

Soames headed north. He wore a leather jacket, and he rode a battered,
second-hand motorcycle, and on the saddle behind him an obvious kid
brother rode, leather-jacketed as Soames was, capped as he was, scowling
as Soames did, and in all ways imitating his elder. Which was so
familiar a sight that nobody noticed Fra