There was nothing else left in the bare, bright-lit room.
The long wooden box, with its contents, was gone.
Staggering and gasping for breath, as if he too had been stricken, Hal Samdu came back up the stair, carrying in his great quivering hand the blaster with a thin red drop trembling on the point of the fixed bayonet.
He thrust it into Chan’s bewildered face.
“Captain, do you know this weapon?”
Chan examined it
“I do,” he gulped hoarsely.
“I know it by the serial number, and by the initials etched into the butt.
It is mine.”
Hal Samdu made a choking, furious sound.
“Then, Derron,” he gasped, when he could speak, “you are under arrest.
You are charged with insubordination, gross neglect of duty, treason against the Green Hall, and the murder of Dr. Max Eleroid and his assistant, Jonas Thwayne.
You will be held hi irons, without bail, for trial by court-martial before your superior officers in the Legion.
And God help you, Derron!”
Chan was swaying, paralyzed.
A great far wind roared in his ears.
The black rock and the shining battleship and the threatening men in green around him, all dimmed and wavered.
He swayed, fighting for awareness.
“But I didn’t do it,” he gasped.
“I tell you, sir, this can’t be—”
But icy jaws of metal had already caught his wrist, and the great ruthless voice of Hal Samdu was roaring at him:
“Now, Derron, what did you do with Eleroid’s invention?”
What did you do with Eleroid’s invention?… What did you do with Eleroid’s invention?… WHAT DID YOU DO WITH ELEROID’S INVENTION?… WHAT DID YOU DO…
Chan Derron heard that question a million times.
It was shouted at him, whispered at him, shrieked at him.
He ate it with prison food, and breathed it with dank prison air.
It was beaten into him with men’s hard fists, and burned into his brain with the blaze of cruel atomic lights.
He was commanded to answer it, threatened, begged, tricked, drugged, flung into solitary, starved, promised freedom and riches, picked to mental shreds by the psychologists and psychiatrists, offered fabulous bribes—and threatened again.
Of course he couldn’t answer it.
Because of that fact alone he was kept alive, even after he hungered for the quiet freedom of death.
The court-martial had indeed, when at last the torture of the trial had ended, returned a triple sentence of death, on two counts of murder, and one of treason.
But that had been commuted by Commander Kalam, the day he embarked on the great research expedition to the green comet, to life imprisonment at hard labor in the Legion prison on Ebron.
Chan heard that news in his cell with a sense of sick frustration.
He knew that now he would not be allowed to die, any more than he was let live, until that unanswerable question was answered.
And the great grim prison on the asteroid, as he had foreknown, brought him no escape from those angrily and incredulously demanding voices.
The person, even the person of a convicted criminal, was legally safeguarded by the Green Hall.
And the tradition of the Legion was against cruel and unusual methods.
The safety of mankind was a greater end, however, than the letter of the law, and the Legion existed to guard that safety.
The court-martial had found adequate circumstantial evidence that Chan Derron had killed Max Eleroid and his assistant, and then, failing to escape with the unknown new device, had somehow disposed of it.
The case was absurdly simple.
There was only that one question.
The entire organization of the Legion moved as ruthlessly to extract the answer from Chan as rollers pressing the juice from a grape.
Therein the Legion failed—but only because the answer was not in him.
Chan lived two years in the prison on Ebron.
Then he escaped.
For two years more the Legion hunted him.
3 The Sign of the Basilisk
“No.”
Jay Kalam lifted weary eyes from the documents stacked before him, on his long desk in the tower of the Green Hall.
“Tell Caspar Hannas I can’t talk to him.”