done? What better plan could you have proposed?"

"You could have built your own flyer, couldn't you? Since money's no
object to you, and you don't even know, accurately, how much you've
got--nobody can keep track of figures like those--why risk legal
interference and international complications at the start, by--"

"To build the kind of flyer we need would have taken six or seven
months. Not all my money could have produced it, sooner. And absolute
ennui can't wait half a year. I'd have gone wholly stale, and so would
you, and all of them. We'd have lost them.

"Again, news of any such operations would have got out. My plans would
possibly have been checkmated. In the third place, what you propose
would have been tame sport, indeed, as a beginning! Three excellent
reasons, my dear Major, why this is positively the only way."

"Perhaps. But there's always the chance of failure, now. The guards--"

"After your own experience, when that capsule burst in the laboratory,
you talk to me about guards?"

"Suppose one escapes?"

The Master only smiled grimly, and sighted his course up the dark
river.

"And the alarm is sure to be given, in no time. Why didn't you just
buy the thing outright?"