ONE AGAINST THE LEGION
1 The Deadly Invention
“Unusual.
Important.
Indubitably dangerous.”
The low grave voice of Commander Kalam, without losing its deliberate calm, had emphasized each word.
“You have been selected for this duty, Captain Derron, because the Legion feels that you have earned implicit trust.”
After four grim years, that scene was still as vivid in the mind of Chan Derron, as if a red-hot die had stamped it there.
For that strange assignment had turned all his life, out of beckoning promise, into the dark incredible web of mystery and terror and despair.
“Yes, sir.”
Chan Derron saluted briskly.
He stood eagerly at attention, waiting in that huge, simply furnished chamber in the Green Hall that was the office of the Commander of the Legion of Space.
A big man, lean and trim and straight hi the green of the Legion, he looked steadfast as a statue of bronze.
His hair, rebellious against the comb, was like red-bronze wire.
His skin was deeply bronzed with space-burn.
Even his eyes held glints of unchanging bronze.
His whole bearing held a promise of uncrushable strength that it warmed the Commander’s heart to see.
Beneath his military readiness, however, Chan Derron’s heart was thumping.
He was proud of the uniform that had been his for less than a year; fiercely proud of the decorations he had already won, in the war with the Cometeers.
And he was desperately eager to know what was coming next.
His breath caught, and he watched the lean dark face of Jay Kalam.
“I have ordered all of Admiral-General Samdu’s fleet to assist with this assignment—it is important enough to justify that,” the Com-mander was saying.
“But the crucial duty is such that one ship—and one man, Captain Derron—must be trusted to carry it out.”
Chan Derron tried to swallow the little lump of eagerness in his throat.
A duly commissioned captain—he mustn’t tremble like a wide-eyed cadet.
After all, he was twenty-two.
But the low-voiced question startled him:
“You know of Dr. Max Eleroid?”
“Of—of course,” he stammered.
“If you mean the geodesic engineer?
The man who redesigned the geodyne, and invented the geopeller?
At the academy we studied his text on geodesy.”
“So you were an engineer?”
The Commander faintly smiled.
“Dr. Eleroid,” he said, “is probably the greatest physical scientist living— although his dread of publicity has kept him from becoming widely known.
And he has just done something new.”
Chan Derron waited, wondering.
“This morning,” Jay Kalam said, “Eleroid came into this office, with an assistant behind him staggering under a box of equipment.
He was frightened.
He begged me to take him and his invention under the protection of the Legion.
“The invention is his most important, he said, and his most dangerous.
He had decided not to work it out at all, he told me—until the System was placed in danger by the coming of the Cometeers.
“He set out to complete it, then, as a weapon.
It is a little too late for the war.
But he intends to entrust it to the Legion as an adjunct to AKKA in the defense of mankind.
“Yesterday, anyhow, he found evidence that an intruder had been in his laboratory—that’s somewhere west, in the Painted Desert.
This unknown spy has him baffled and very thoroughly scared.
Only two people had been trusted with any details of his work, he said— his daughter, and this assistant, Jonas Thwayne.
He has no clue to the spy’s identity; but he gives him credit for being a remarkably clever man.”
The Commander straightened sternly.