The thought that now obsessed her was that Barney might have been with Colonel Verney in the engine-house when it had blown up. She was past tears, but her very heart-strings were wrung with the visual image of her gay, laughter-loving Barney as a broken, twisted body being carried on a stretcher from that still-smoking ruin down in the valley. Her belief that he despised her made no difference to her love for him. And since she had realized, from what Wash had told her, that he must be one of Colonel Verney's young men, although she could not begin to account for such a strange metamorphosis, her love for him, instead of being only an unreasoning passion, had been sanctified by respect and admiration.

For what seemed a long time she sat crouched, wringing her hands, in the wireless cabin. It drifted through her mind that, by ripping at the wires and bending the terminals, she might put the set out of action. But a moment's thought told her that whether he made his proposed broadcast to the world or not did not matter in the least, as that had no bearing on his ability to launch the rocket.

At last he joined her. Waving her from the chair, he sat down in it and began to fiddle with the apparatus. She stood in the doorway, no longer feeling a compulsion to remain with him, but too mentally exhausted to make the effort necessary to break away.

He spent a good ten minutes tuning in to the wave length he required, then began to speak in what she imagined to be Russian. That he should have wished her to remain to hear him she now guessed to be due to his inordinate vanity's demanding the presence of an audience, however humble or unable to appreciate what he was saying, to witness this epoch-making declaration he was making to the world.

Actually he was telling the Russians that their leaders had betrayed the masses by abandoning the Marxist faith of equality achieved through violence, and had become money-grubbing bourgeois intellectuals. He announced the imminent destruction of the régime - although he made no mention of his rocket or the way in which he meant to bring that about - and told the Russians that those who survived the purge he meant to initiate would be given a new chance to be a law unto themselves and enjoy to the utmost all the pleasures this world had to offer. He then went on to talk of himself and the part that, under Satan, lie would play in the New Order that was to emerge from the Old.