"Jump the details, idiot! Can't you move faster than a paralytic snail? What's the final result?" "The result is, sir," answered Herzog, meek and cowed under this harrying, "that calcium nitrate is produced, a very excellent fertilizer. It's a form of nitrogen, you see, directly obtained from air." "At what cost?" "One ton of fixed nitrogen in that form costs about $150 or $160." "Indeed?" commented Flint. "The same amount, combined in Chile saltpeter, comes to--?" "A little over $300, sir." "Hear that, Wally?" exclaimed the Billionaire, turning to his now interested associate. "Even if this idea never goes a step farther, there's a gold mine in just the production of fertilizer from air! But, after all, that will only be a by-product. It's the oxygen we're after, and must have!" He faced Herzog again. "Is any oxygen liberated, during the process?" he demanded. "At one stage, yes, sir. But in the present process, it is absorbed, also." Flint's eyebrows contracted nervously. For a moment he stood thinking, while Herzog eyed him with trepidation, and Waldron, almost forgetting to smoke, waited developments with interest. The Billionaire, however, wasted but scant time in consideration. It was not money now, he lusted for, but power. Money was, to him, no longer any great desideratum. At most, it could now mean no more to him than a figure on a check-book or a page of statistics in his private memoranda. But power, unlimited, indisputable power over the whole earth and the fulness thereof, power which none might dispute, power before which all humanity must bow--God! the lust of it now gripped and shook his soul. Paling a little, but with eyes ablaze, he faced the anxious scientist. "Herzog! See here!" "Yes, sir?" "I've got a job for you, understand?" "Yes, sir. What is it?" "A big job, and one on which your entire future depends. Put it through, and I'll do well by you. Fail, and by the Eternal, I'll break you! I can, and will, mark that! Do you get me?" "I--yes, sir--that is, I'll do my best, and--" "Listen! You go to work at once, immediately, understand? Work out for me some process, some practicable method by which the nitrogen and oxygen can both be collected in large quantities from the air. Everything in my laboratories at Oakwood Heights is at your disposal. Money's no object. Nothing counts, now, but _results_! "I want the process all mapped out and ready for me, in its essential outlines, two weeks from today. If it isn't--" His gesture was a menace. "If it is--well, you'll be suitably rewarded. And no leaks, now. Not a word of this to any one, understand? If it gets out, you know what I can do to you, and will! Remember Roswell; remember Parker Hayes. _They_ let news get to the Dillingham-Saunders people, about the new Tezzoni radio-electric system--and one's dead, now, a suicide; the other's in Sing-Sing for eighteen years. Remember that--and keep your mouth shut!" "Yes, sir. I understand."