He lost, and bent again with a worried frown to his calculator.
“Strange animals, men,” muttered Lars Eccard.
Beyond in a shallow rocky cup that John Star guarded, they discovered his wife, Aladoree. She was kneeling, her proud slight body shaken ever and again with paroxysms of dreadful coughing. Her quick hands were busy with some odd little instrument on the ledge before her, improvised from stray bits of wood and metal.
She looked up, and saw Jay Kalam. A weary little greeting smiled above her mask, but he saw the death of a hope in her eyes.
“We had expected to see you, Jay,” came John Star’s hoarse voice.
“But on the Inflexible.”
Jay Kalam looked down at the crude simplicity of the half-completed instrument.
This harmless-seeming toy, he knew, was the supreme weapon of mankind, capable of sweeping any known target out of existence.
He breathed the symbol of its power:
“AKKA?”
The coughing woman who was the keeper of it shook her head.
“The instrument isn’t finished,” she whispered.
“The parts for it that I was wearing, disguised as jewels, have been taken from me.
We haven’t found materials enough. I need wire for the coil.”
Jay Kalam fumbled for the small black disk of his ultrawave communicator.
“Perhaps the parts of this will help.”
“Perhaps.”
The haggard woman took it from him.
“But even if the instrument is completed, I don’t see how it can serve us.
For the Basilisk’s identity, and the seat of his strange power, are still unknown.
We don’t even know where we are.”
“But we can guess,” Jay Kalam told her.
“We made a fairly conclusive identification of the star from which the Basilisk’s peculiar robot came.
From the abundance of free chlorine here, and the appearance of the sun above—it is pretty obviously type K9e—I believe that this is the same star.
That means that our own sun ought to be eighty light-years southward.
When night comes, so that we can see the constellations and the Milky Way—”
“When night comes,” John Star broke in huskily, “we won’t be here.
The tide floods this rock.”
“In that case—” Jay Kalam choked and coughed.
It was a long time before he could catch his strangling breath, and see again.
He looked soberly, then, at the tortured man and the wan-faced woman before him. They were waiting, very grave.
“In that case,” he whispered again, “I see but one thing that we can do.
A very desperate thing. But it offers the only hope there is.”
“Jay—” John Star gulped.
“You don’t mean—”
The grim dark eyes of the Commander met the patient, luminous gray ones of the keeper.
“If you can complete the instrument,” he told her quietly, “I think you must use it immediately to destroy this sun, this planet, everything in this stellar system.
Even ourselves.”
The woman’s fine head nodded gravely.
“I’ll do that,” she said.
Her quick hands were turning the little disk of the communicator.
“And the parts of this,” she told him, “will supply everything I need.”
“Wait,” croaked John Star.
“First—couldn’t we use it to report our position and our plight?
There’s still the Legion—”
The Commander shook his head.
“This is just an ultrawave unit,” he said.
“With no visiwave relay, it would take eighty years for our call to reach the System, and eighty years for the answer to come back—and there’s no receiver anywhere sensitive enough to pick up the signals.
Even the visiwave relay, that filled a whole room on the Inflexible, had a maximum theoretical range of less than half a light-year.
“No, John.