"Thank you. How are you coming with the contracts?"

"Well, some of the cities seem rather skeptical but they'll come through as soon as we have one getting all the microwave power it needs straight into its mains. I think we are quite safe to begin construction of the microwave-mirror relay systems to deliver the power. It won't suddenly run out, will it?"

"Not for the next few million years," said Heller. "You're all okay on that, then?"

"Oh, yes. Just business routine. I think ratepayers will be delighted at a penny a kilowatt. I'm assigning industrial rate at a quarter of a cent. There is one problem, though: It's going to be a problem reinvesting all our profits, as this isn't costing us anything but installation and maintenance."

"I'm sure you're up to that," said Heller.

"Well, yes," said Izzy. "But there is one more thing. Mr. Rockecenter is not going to be very happy when the oil and coal contracts start getting cancelled left and right."

"I suppose he won't," said Heller. "Now, have you gotten all the options to sell the oil-company stock?"

"Options to sell in hand," said Izzy. "I included on my own initiative a lot of national and small oil companies, too. We have options to sell practically every share of oil stock in the world."

"Good," said Heller. "My next project is to make it go down."

"Well, it will certainly fall, with this cheap microwave-power network."

"True. But when I say 'down,' I mean down," said Heller.

"It averages eighty to a hundred dollars a share right now," said Izzy. "How 'down' do you think 'down' should be?"

"About fifty cents to a dollar," said Heller.

"Oy!" said Izzy. "Mr. Rockecenter will be broke broke."

"That's the idea," said Heller. "Broke plus broke equals bankrupt. So what I want you to do now is obtain an additional set of options to buy all the oil shares in the world at one dollar."

"WHAT?"

"You heard me. Your sell options will go for a fortune. Then, when the bottom is out, your buy options will put you in control of every oil company in the world."

"Oy," said Izzy. "Our dream of corporations running the planet is going to come true! I hope Fate isn't listening in on this conversation."

"We'll make it come true somehow," Heller reassured him.

"Mr. Jet, just selling cheap power to cities won't drive the stocks that low."

"I know it won't. But this next project will. Anything else, Izzy?"

"Yes, Mr. Jet. Don't do anything dangerous. I worry."

"Oh, it's all very calm where I am," said Heller. "Bye-bye."

The viewer-phone went blank.

My wits were in a hurricane. (Bleep) this Heller! That black-hole microwave-power system would be the end of Octopus! Cheap power for all of Earth? Unthinkable! What ruin it spelled for poor Mr. Rockecenter!

Suddenly I remembered that the Russians had long ago perfected satellite killers. I began to try to figure out how I could get free and get the Russians to locate and blast that contrivance and black hole he had put in the sky.

Oh, would THAT solve my problems! I would be the hero of the hour!

Somehow, some way, I must get myself out of this! The situation was utterly intolerable for Rockecenter, for Hisst, for me. I could rescue everything if I just put my wits to it. But how was I going to do it?

Heller addressed the tug, "Any sign of that other assassin pilot?"

"No, sir. I've been checking ever since we returned to normal time. But I would advise extreme caution, sir. I have turned us back to total absorption of any and all waves. But I must bring to your attention that if we go speeding about, we will leave a magnetic wake that can be spotted. I severely... sincerely... severely... sincerely—incorrect nuance. Urgently. I urgently counsel that we just lie still."

"Override, negative," said Heller. He got out a book. "Enter these coordinates in your itinerary data bank and then plot a sequential course to them." And he began to read a long series of exact spacial positions all over Earth: North America, the Caribbean, South America, Australia, Asia, the Middle East, Russia, Central Europe, Europe, Alaska and Canada—it went on and on and on.

What was he up to now?

Finally he finished and the tug said, "I have all of them, sir. They are strung now into sequential numbered positions."

"Go to position one," said Heller.

"That is Watson, California," said the tug. "Just below us."

"Aim the bow at it," said Heller. He was lifting the radiation shields off the ports. The tug giddily tipped up. Five hundred miles below, the Los Angeles area was a smudge of yellow smog.

Heller adjusted his screens. Magnification of the middle one showed that we were pointed straight at an oil refinery!

"Just hold there," he told the tug. He reached over to the viewer-phone and buzzed it. The worried face of Izzy came on.

"Just checking," said Heller. "Have you got the buy options yet on all the oil shares in the world at one dollar?"

"Good heavens," said Izzy. "They think we're insane—that we're wasting our option money. But, yes, our brokers are phoning in right now. Please hold."

He chattered into another phone. Then he came back to ours. "Yes—they think we've lost our minds, but we've got them. Mr. Jet, how could it possibly fall to that?"

"You'll see," said Heller. "Bye-bye."

He returned to his magnified view of the refinery below. He was checking a floor plan. "Atmospheric pipefill," he said. He made a couple of tiny adjustments to the position of the ship.

Then his hands went out toward the firing control of the laser cannon he had lately installed.

"NO!" I cried in desperation. "Don't blow up the refineries!"

His finger pressed the firing button. The gun overhead made a brief whirr.

I watched in horror. The enlarged picture of a part of a refinery, I thought, would burst into flame.

I waited. ! It didn't!

"Corky, position two," said Heller.

"That's Wilmington, California," said the tug. And we moved.

Heller did the same thing as before.

I could see no change below.

"Position three," said Heller.

"That's Long Beach, California," said the tug.

Heller repeated his actions.

"Position four," said Heller.

"That's El Segundo, California," said the tug.

Heller went through his same drill.

"Say, what the Hells is going on?" I said. "Aren't you going to blow anything up?"

"I wish you'd make up your mind," said Heller. "Half an hour ago you were telling me I shouldn't."

"Please tell me what you are doing."

He glanced at me. "Everything they do in a refinery first passes into what they call the atmospheric pipefill from the crude-oil tanks. From the pipefill it goes on through every other process in the place: jet fuel, diesel fuel, virgin naphtha, you name it. All I'm doing is putting a false radiation charge in the metals of the pipefills. It will register like mad on a Geiger counter but it actually doesn't affect another thing. You're not going anywhere, so there is no reason not to tell you that Izzy has the device that nulls the wave."

He turned away and went back to work, and between him and the tug, they systematically did the same thing to every blessed oil refinery in the whole world.

It took a day and a half to cover them all.

Then Heller caught some sleep. We were over Canada now, having been everywhere else above the globe.

I crouched there thinking, what a strange thing to do. He wasn't actually destroying anything at all. It seemed very impractical to me. Certainly not an Apparatus textbook procedure. He might be a Royal officer, but he would certainly never qualify for a real organization like ours. No explosions! What an oversight!

Bathed and shaved and in fresh clothes, he came back to the flight deck. He fed the cat and then he fed me. He chained me back up to the pipe and sat down in the planetary-pilot chair. He buzzed Izzy and gave him a phone number and told him to ring it and, when he had the party, to hold the instrument close to the viewer-phone.