“But,” the commander went on, “if he failed to provide his creations with any moral restraints, Eldo Arrynu seems to have had no difficulty in endowing them with extraordinary cunning—or even, sometimes, with an exceptional intelligence.”
Jay Kalam paused momentarily, and continued almost casually:
“You must already have guessed what I’m about to tell you, Stephen Oreo.
You aren’t a man.
You are a synthetic monster from the laboratory of Eldo Arrynu.”
The frozen violet star dipped as if it had bowed.
The sardonic voice of Stephen Oreo spoke out of the misty pillar, ringing as if with a careless amusement:
“Thank you, Commander.”
“Your case,” Jay Kalam went on, “is fully discussed in the diary.
Eldo Arrynu took exceptional pains with your creation.
His sublime artistic genius must have got the better, temporarily, of his practical business instincts.
He designed you to be a perfect being, a true superman.
“Soon, however, after you emerged from his vats and incubators, he perceived the fatal flaw in you—the cold fiend, sleeping.
He saw that his supreme effort had fallen far short of humanity, in the most vital direction possible.
“The diary records a curious struggle.
One entry praises your physical perfection and your remarkable intelligence; it glows with his love for you—for he did love you, with the absorption of an artist in his masterpiece, and the devotion of a man for his son.
“The next entry, however, is a gloomy record of doubts and misgivings, filled with evidences of the fiendish coldness that all Ar-rynu’s arts could never eradicate from you. It ends with the determination to destroy you.
“Unfortunately, however, that strange exile could never quite bring himself to the task.
His love and his well-founded fear drove him at last into a regrettable compromise.
He sealed you into a mag-nelithium cylinder, with everything necessary to preserve your life, and cast you adrift in space, far from the asteroid.
“By concealing his identity from you,” said the commander solemnly, “he hoped to escape the consequences of his folly.
But even so, you destroyed your own maker, Stephen Oreo, when you loosed the Cometeers upon the System.
“It’s possible that your long, helpless confinement in the cylinder had some farther adverse influence in the formation of a character that was never good.
Some part of your insatiable appetite for power and superiority must be by way of compensation for that imprisonment.
“But you were never human—”
“I’m grateful, Commander,” Stephen Oreo’s voice broke hi, carelessly mocking as ever.
“But I fail to perceive any advantage to you in revealing my origins.
Certainly, it isn’t going to make me any more generous to the human cattle on which I feed, to know that I was never one of them.”
The bright mist chuckled.
“If you expected gratitude—”
The voice paused abruptly, as the shining ruler of the Cometeers made an imperative forward motion, and then it added quickly:
“Now you may prepare to die.”
19 The Man Who Broke
Listening to the commander’s quietly spoken narrative, staring at the luminous and beautiful thing that was now Stephen Orco, Bob Star had been shaken with a savage conflict of strange emotions.
For his great enemy had never been anything more human than this thing of frozen fire!
That fact explained part of the fear and hatred that had twisted and smothered him ever since that dreadful night at the academy.
It was no man that had driven the dull blade of the Iron Confessor into his skull, but a thing already inhuman.
With that knowledge, the pulse of pain behind that old scar seemed to weaken and waver in its beat, for the first time in nine years.
He dared again to feel that he might somehow find strength to defy the crippling command that Orco’s transformed voice had burned into his brain.
His empty hands tightened, hungry for a weapon.
He was crouching beside the empty box.
Old Giles Habibula was still bent over it, clinging to the sides of it when the waves of retching shook him, still sobbing noisily and frequently blowing his nose.
“Now you may prepare to die.”
The hurried final words of Stephen Orco seemed to echo in his mind.
“Because my imperial colleague seems peculiarly apprehensive about your presence in the chamber of generation – ”
Bob Star felt the slight, unobtrusive pressure of the old man’s trembling arm against his side, and then the cold weight of the small object Giles Habibula pressed into his hand.
A light of understanding burst over him; he knew why the commander had wanted time.
Turning to shield the object with his body, he stole a quick glance at it.
A puzzling weapon – if it were a weapon.
A polished cube of some hard black stuff, not quite two inches on an edge.