“Mortal me!
But for that dexterity, I should never have been here, rotting in the hands of a lot of fearful monsters, waiting for torture and death!
Ah, no!
But for that affair on Venus, twenty years ago, I should never have been hi the Legion.
And ‘twas that dexterity that tempted me then—that, and the fame of a certain cellar of wine!
“Poor old Giles, brought by his own genius to ruin and starvation and death———”
“But now’s the chance to make your skill undo all that,” urged John Star.
“Can you open the lock?”
“Ah, me, lad!
The penalty of unjust obscurity!
If I had been a painter, a poet, a blessed musician, you would never dare cast doubt upon the power of my art.
With my genius, it would be known from, end to end of the System.
Ah, lad, it was an ill tide of destiny into which I was cast!
“That even you, lad, should doubt my genius!”
Great tears trickled down his nose.
“Come, Giles!” cried Jay Kalam.
“Show him.”
The three of them lifted Giles Habibula—now as easier task than it would once have been—so that he could reach the barred grating, ten feet above the floor.
He looked at the black case of the lock, fingered it with his oddly sure, oddly delicate hands.
He set his ear against the case, tapped it with the fingers, reached up through the bars and moved something, listening.
“My mortal eyes,” he at last sighed plaintively.
“I never saw such a clever lock as this.
Combination.
The case is precious tight. No place to insert an instrument, to feel it out. And the wicked thing has levers, instead of cylinders.
Never was a lock like this in the System.”
Again he listened intently to tiny clickings from the lock, resting the tips of sensitive fingers against the case, now here, now there, as if vibration revealed the inner mechanism.
“Bless my poor old bones!” he muttered once.
“A clever new idea!
If we were back hi the System, the patents on it would earn me all the fame and wealth that I’ve been cheated of.
A lock that challenges even the genius of Giles Habibula!”
Abruptly he gasped, stooping.
“Let me down!
A fearful monster coming!”
They lowered him to the floor.
Above, a huge greenish hemisphere floated over the grating.
A gross mass of glistening, slimy, translucent flesh, palpitating with strange slow life.
An immense, ovoid eye stared at them with such a dread intensity that John Star felt it must be reading their very minds.
A dark tentacle dropped four small brown bricks through the grat-ing.
Eric Ulnar, breaking from his apathy, snatched one of them and gnawed it eagerly.
“Food,” he whimpered.
“This is all they give us.”
A cube of dark, moist jelly, John Star found one of them to be; it had an odd, unpleasant odor, an insipid lack of flavor.
“Food!” wept Giles Habibula, biting into another.
“Ah, good life’s sake, if they call this food, I’ll eat my blessed boots first, as I did in the prison on Mars!”
“But we must eat it,” said Jay Kalam.
“Even if it isn’t palatable.
We’ll need strength.”
The greenish, quivering vastness of their jailor presently floated away from above the grating; they lifted Giles Habibula, to resume his battle with the lock.
He muttered in exasperation from time to time; his breath, in the absorption of his effort, became a slow sighing.
Sweat stood out on his face, glistening in the dim green light that shone through the bars.