“Why yes, you’re John.”
The trembling thing, abruptly sob-shaken, clung to his shoulder.
“The Medusae!” That wail held more than human woe.
“They tricked us!
They’re murdering mankind!
They’re bombing the System with red gas, to eat men’s bodies away, and make them insane.
They’re murdering mankind!”
“Aladoree?” demanded John Star.
“Where’s she?”
“They made me torture her!” sobbed the weak, wild voice.
“They want her secret.
Want AKKA!
But she won’t tell.
And they won’t let me die till she tells.
They won’t let me die!” it shrilled.
“They won’t let me die!
“But when she tells, they’ll kill us all!”
20 “A Certain Slight Dexterity”
“My blessed bottle of wine!” sobbed Giles Habibula, plaintively.
“I carried it out of the sunken cruiser.
I carried it through the jungle of thorns, I carried it up the black and evil mountains.
For precious months I carried it on the raft.
I risked my mortal life to save it, fighting a wicked flying monster.
I dived for it into the horrors of the yellow river.
I was near drowning with it in the fall beneath that aqueduct!
“The only bottle of wine on the whole black and monstrous continent!”
His fishy eyes clouded, and the clouds gave forth a rain of tears.
He sank down on the bare metal floor of the cell in a stricken heap.
“Poor old Giles Habibula, lonely, desolate, forlorn old soldier of the Legion.
Accused for a pirate, hunted like a rat out of his own native System, caught like a mortal rat hi a wicked trap to be tortured and murdered by the monsters of an alien star!
“And, ah me! even that is not enough!
I’d carried that bottle through a mortal lot of hardship and peril.
I’d held it up to the light, many a tune, sweet life knows, my old mouth watering.
Always I’d save it for the hour of greater need.
Ah, yes, for such a tune of mortal bleak necessity as faces us now!
“And it must fall!
Fall two thousand fearful feet.
Every precious drop of it.
Gone!
Ah, Giles Habibula———”
His voice was overcome by cataclysmic grief, earthquakes of sighs and storms of tears.
John Star questioned Eric Ulnar again.
He had slept, that shattered human wreck, his haggard, emaciated body exhausted by the outburst of hysteria.
He was calm when he woke, sunk hi a sort of apathy, speaking in a dull, weary tone.
“The Medusae are planning to desert this planet,” he said.
“They have fought for long ages to keep this mother-city alive.
And they’ve done wonders—making this red gas to keep the atmosphere from freezing, and robbing other worlds to replace their exhausted resources.
But now they’re coming to final defeat—because the dying planet is spiraling back into the dying star.
Even they can’t stop that.
They have to go.”