Her voice was a golden song that rang in his heart.
“I’ve a table reserved for us in the grille beside the Diamond Room.
We can talk as we dine.
And then—” The music of her voice missed a note, and through the violet depths of her eyes flashed something black and cold as transgalactic space. “Then,” she said softly, and once more the radiance of her smile set a pain to throbbing in his heart, “we shall play.”
“Wait, please!”
Chan Derron caught his breath, and tried to quiet the wild pulse hammering in his ears.
He made his eyes look for a moment away from the girl’s disturbing beauty, while he mastered his face and his voice.
He turned back to her.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Very sorry—because you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
But I think you have mistaken my identity.
I am Dr. Charles Derrel.
Here from Venus, en route back to Earth.
I’m sorry, but we’ve never met before.
And I don’t know this —did you say—Chan Derron?”
Her fine, proud head shook slightly, and her lustrous platinum hair shimmered in the changing light from the immense, jewel-like columns of the Casino.
There was something subtly mocking in her violet eyes, and Chan noticed for the first time that they were very slightly tilted.
“I could not mistake your identity,” she said softly.
“And if you don’t know Chan Derron, I’ll refresh your memory.”
Her slim quick hands opened a white bag, and allowed him a brief but sufficient glimpse of his own features, beneath the screaming type that offered a quarter of a million dollars in reward.
The bag snapped shut, and her white smile dazzled him.
“Now, Charles,” she asked, “shall we dine?”
Something hi the way she spoke, something far beyond the light, inviting music of her voice, was hard as the great white jewel at her throat, cold as a planet whose sun is dead.
Chan Derron tried to conceal the tiny shudder that ran through his big body.
“Whatever you say, my dear,” he told her.
Inside the massive, gold-rimmed portal, they had to show their reservation checks.
Chan glimpsed the girl’s.
The name on it was Vanya Eloyan.
Residence, Juno.
But it was a yellow temporary check, like his own.
In the dining room, which occupied a triangular space between two of the radiating halls, Chan seated the girl at a secluded, fern-hidden table.
She declined champagne, and so, cautiously, did he.
“Vanya Eloyan,” he said softly, relishing the name.
“Of Juno.” He looked up at her white, dynamic loveliness. “But I think you are a girl of Earth, Vanya.
I’ve never met a colonial with quite your manner, though your accent does suggest that you were educated at the Martian universities.
In science, I should say. And music.
Am I right?”
The white perfection of her face was fixed, suddenly, with a solemnity of purpose almost tragic, though still the sheer beauty of it kept an ache in Chan’s throat.
“I prefer not to speak of myself.”
Her voice, for all its music, was cold as the sun of Neptune.
“I came to meet you here, Chan Derron, to ask you a question.”
She leaned a little forward, her splendid figure tense; her violet eyes lit with a fire bright and terrible.
“What did you do with Dr. Eleroid’s invention?”
All the blood ran out of Chan Derron’s face, leaving it the ghastly gray-white of the pigment he had used.
A cold blade cleft his heart. Icy, strangling hands stopped his breath.
The strength ebbed out of him. His big body sagged toward the table.
In the prison on Ebron he had heard that question ten thousand times, until the very syllables brought back those years of torture.
He had been fighting for two years to escape it.
It was a little time before the dryness of his throat would let him speak, and then he said:
“I didn’t kill Dr. Eleroid.