“I’ll tell you,” she said swiftly.
“But you must keep this to yourself.
Every word.
Even from your officer, Captain Ulnar.”
Her face, when she spoke the name, tensed with a dislike that was almost hate.
“If you say. Though I don’t see———”
“I shall trust you.
First, do you know why you’re here?”
“I’ve orders to guard a girl who knows some mysterious secret.”
“I’m the girl.”
Her voice was more deliberate, more confident.
“I don’t matter.
But the secret, AKKA, is the most valuable and the most dangerous thing in the System.
I must tell you a little more about it than you seem to know.
For AKKA is in terrible danger.
You must help us to save it!”
Quietly, then, she asked a question that seemed odd:
“You know the history, I suppose, of the old wars between the Purples and the Greens?”
“Why, I think so.
Purple was the color of the Emperors. The Greens were the faction led by the research scientists that revolted and set up the democratic Green Hall.
The last Emperor, Adam the Third, abdicated two hundred years ago.”
“Do you know why he abdicated?”
“No.
No, the books didn’t say.
I used to wonder.”
“I must tell you.
It’s important.
The Emperors, you know, enjoyed despotic power.
They were vastly wealthy; they commanded private space fleets, and owned whole planets, outright.
They ruled with an iron cruelty.
The enemies they didn’t liquidate were deported to Pluto.
“An ancestor of mine, Charles Anthar, was shipped out—because of a chance remark in favor of free speech and free research, made to a man he thought a friend!
The finest physicist in the System.
He spent fourteen years in the cold dungeons of the Black Planet.
“On Pluto, he made a scientific discovery. The theory he worked out in his dungeon by pure mathematics.
That took him nine years.
Then his fellow prisoners smuggled materials to him, to build the apparatus he had planned.
It was very simple, but he was five years finding the parts.
“When it was finished, he destroyed the prison guard.
Sitting in his cell, he forced Adam the Third to obey his orders.
If the Emperor had refused, Charles Anthar could have wrecked the solar system.
“Since, his discovery has defended the peace of the Green Hall.
It is so very dangerous that only one person at a time is permitted to know it.
Only this much of it has ever been put in writing—an abbreviation.”
She showed him, tattooed on a white palm, the letters AKKA.
“And now you are in danger?” John Star whispered.
“I am.
The Purples didn’t lose their wealth and influence, you see, and they’ve always plotted to restore the Empire.
The terrible power of AKKA is all that restrains their schemes.
They want the secret, but it has always been safely kept for the Green Hall, by the descendants of Charles Anthar.