"No, it doesn't, does it?" she agreed, sweetly. "And I'm sure you'll do a better job if I'm not along at all!" She was hurrying from the room before Dane could open his mouth.
Awkwardness took possession of the group. Everyone began to find business elsewhere, and soon there remained only Samuel Cabot and the little party who would return with the convoys.
Vanz tried to pass it off by joking with Cabot as they shook hands in farewell. But his joke found a dismal silence. A moment later, Dane and the others said good-bye to the elderly leader and followed Vanz from the room.
BROOKE was on the outskirts of Central Park an hour later when the Valiant shot from the ground, stirring up miniature whirlwinds among the leaves and fine dust of the paths. Low, black thunderheads engulfed the ship, billowing in behind it as swiftly as it passed. A moment later, the convoy fleet across the river began to depart.
As the last one left, the girl's slim figure slipped into a small car at the curb and she sped into the jumble of New York's awakening traffic. Leaving the center of town, she came into the quieter, dingy sections of the East Side. In one block, most of the buildings had been ravaged by fire. Here she stopped and began to walk.
Repair crews had not yet penetrated this far. A gaunt old apartment house had lost half its height when a pursuit ship crashed into it with a charge of bombs. Brooke unobtrusively turned into a side entrance and descended to the basement. In a dark room where rats rustled in scattered papers and the sun was known only by its shadows, she went to a low door and knocked softly.
Immediately the door opened a sliver and a bearded, hollow-cheeked face moved into the aperture, the cold blue ring of a pistol held a foot beneath it. East Bayard's voice croaked:
"Brooke! Thank God! We thought they'd got suspicious of you—"
Brooke's features shone with eagerness. She slid into the candle-lit room, and for a moment East clasped her in his strong arms. Then she exclaimed:
"They don't suspect anything yet, the fools! All but Sam Cabot and Tolek Serj have just left for Io with the convoy. You could get Cabot and Serj right now—they'll be leaving the building before long.
Defeat had stamped him with its haggard badge, but the fervor of hatred was like a scalding fluid in his body. Bayard shook his head impatiently.
"It's a short chance we wouldn't be seen. We're going after the others."
"Using what for a ship?" scoffed Clay Gorman. "They'll watch those battle-ships like hawks."
The four other men who sat on boxes about the cellar watched each man's face as he spoke. Desperate men they were, eager for any change to escape.
"Let them have their ships," Bayard snapped. "For this job, I'll take a rocket ship of our own make."
"But, East—!" Brooke regarded him incredulously. "The battle over the city showed the superiority of the Red Spot concentrate as a weapon and motive power over our products."
"In this atmosphere, maybe," Bayard said. He patted some wrinkled, dirty papers in his shirt pocket. "Those notes of Benchley's have kept me from going crazy these last three days. They've done more than that, too. Given us a valuable weapon. Benchley was something of a physicist. Enough of one to learn more about the concentrate than even the Ionians
