We approached Callisto without meeting any hostile action, and I dispatched an ultrawave message, calling on the mutineers to surrender.
The answer was something like a sun, fired at us from the fortress above the city of Lei.”
“The sun-gun?” Bob Star whispered.
“I heard rumors, you know, in spite of the censorship and the way my father tried to shield me.”
“The correspondents named it that,” Jay Kalam nodded.
“The weapon was an improvement over something the monsters of the Runaway Star had used against us twenty years before.
An energy vortex, which warps the coordinates of time and space to make all the heavy elements as unstable as plutonium—and creates a resistless attraction to draw more matter into its terrible whirlpool of atomic annihilation.”
His dark face had stiffened.
“Stephen Oreo must be as brilliant as you say.
He had designed that dreadful thing from scraps of information the exiles of Callisto had got from the creatures of the Runaway Star, while the Purples under Eric were in alliance with them.
But somehow he had multiplied the range and power of it.
That first shot destroyed two of our finest ships.
I saw at once that Oreo’s weapon could reach every planet in the System, with those atomic shots.
“Your mother had already assembled her own secret weapon.
As much as I dislike wholesale destruction, I asked her to wipe out the city of Lei with all its surrounding fortifications.
“You saw the instrument of the peace, Bob, back there in the Jade Room.
Your mother must have told you that the working of it is not spectacular.
I was not surprised that nothing seemed to happen when she tried to operate it.
But I could see her expression of puzzled fear when she turned to me, a. moment afterward.
“ ‘It doesn’t work,’ she whispered.
“One glance at the screen of a tele-periscope was enough to show that the fortifications of Lei were still unchanged.
I was able to step up the magnification enough to see the atomic gun itself—a colossal skeleton tube of metal girders, set up on a mountaintop beside the city.
“While I was looking, another vortex came spinning toward us.
A sort of spiral nebula in miniature, in which meteors and ships exploded as furiously as if they had suddenly turned to pure pluto-nium.
That second shot caught three more cruisers, and your mother saw at once that we had been defeated.
“Someone else, she told me, had come upon the principle of AKKA.
She tried to explain, without compromising her secret, that the weapon utilizes a singular instability of the universe which is such that any master of the device can prevent its use by any other.”
Bob Star was nodding.
“She spoke to me about what she called a fulcrum,” he said.
“The device she puts together is a lever, and the mind supplies the force, but there is only one fulcrum.”
His breath caught sharply.
“Had Stephen Oreo discovered—that?”
The commander nodded bleakly.
“Your mother’s failure was sufficient evidence, she said, that another master of AKKA was fighting us.
Her weapon wouldn’t work again, she told me, until that other person was dead—or at least until his instrument had been taken from him.
“Of course your mother was able to keep Oreo from using the secret against us, but his atomic gun itself was enough to beat our fleet.
We lost six more vessels as we fled.
A triumphant ultrawave message from Oreo followed us.
“His message was insolently phrased.
It confirmed your mother’s belief that he was the new master of AKKA.
It demanded that the Green Hall recognize him as the supreme ruler of an independent Jovian Empire.
“But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy Oreo’s imperial ambitions.
He demanded trading rights and other concessions on every planet, and humiliating limitations upon the strength and movements of the Legion.
It was clear that he planned to dominate the whole System.”
Jay Kalam stood rigidly straight amid the rich simplicity of that great, soundless room upon the racing battleship.
His lean face was grimly set.
His dark eyes were narrowed sternly.
The vibrant ring of his low voice seemed to Bob Star like an undying echo of mighty deeds.
“We were defeated,” he said softly. “But not vanquished.
The Legion has never been vanquished, Bob.