I think he hoped until the end to persuade Arrynu to give up his illicit researches and turn his gifts to something better.”
She paused for an instant, biting her full lip.
“I had admired him, since I was a girl,” she continued more slowly.
“And on his last clandestine visit, he—well, discovered me.
He had always ignored me before, but this time I was older. Seventeen.
He began making violent love to me. He was a vigorous and passionate man.
The romance of his outlaw life had always intrigued me.
He told me about the luxuries and the beauties of the uncharted asteroid where he had his secret stronghold, and begged me to go back with him.
“And I would have gone.
I was young enough—insane enough. I thought I loved him.“ Her gray eyes looked beyond Giles Habibula, and for a moment she was silent. ”I’ve sometimes wished I had gone.
In spite of everything he did, Eldo was the greatest man I’ve known —except, perhaps, my father.
“But I told my father, the day we were to leave.
He was terribly upset.
He began telling me things I had only guessed before, about the unpleasant side of Arrynu’s character—the illegal researches, the manufacture of outlawed drugs, the ring of criminals Arrynu had gathered and dominated.
“In spite of all that, I was still young enough and mad enough to go, until my father went on to tell me about the androids—the synthetic things like Stephen Oreo, but most of them female, that Arrynu had made and sold.
Lovely but soulless criminal slaves, that usually robbed and murdered their pleasure-seeking purchasers and then returned to Arrynu to be sold to another victim.
“That convinced me. I refused to see Arrynu again.
My father talked to him, just once more.
I don’t know what was said, but that was the end of their odd friendship.
Arrynu returned to his hidden planetoid.
I know now what he did there.”
An old brooding horror darkened the eyes of the girl.
“He made the thing he called Luroa. Her body had the superhuman strength of the androids.
Her brain had the same inhuman, pitiless criminal cunning he had given Stephen Oreo.
But she was modeled after me.
From photographs and his own memory, he created a likeness almost exact.”
“Ah,” breathed Giles Habibula.
“Ah, so.
But lass, how does it come that you have been playing the role of that mortal android?”
“Arrynu kept Luroa with him,” the girl said, “until the Cometeers, guided by that monster he had made himself, fell upon his little secret world.
Arrynu was killed. But Luroa escaped.
Daring and brilliant and ruthless, she assumed the leadership of her maker’s interplanetary gang.
Her exploits soon got the Legion on her trail. It was then that she conceived her most diabolical scheme.”
The eyes of the girl were almost black, and she paused to shudder.
Her hand groped for the great white jewel at her throat, as if it had been a precious talisman.
“Luroa knew she had been made in my likeness.
She planned to steal my identity.
She was going to abduct me, from the laboratory where I was trying to carry on my father’s work.
She was going to kill my brain with drugs, and let the members of her gang deliver me to the Legion and collect her own reward.
And she would step into my shoes.”
“Ah, a fearful plot!”
Giles Habibula leaned forward anxiously.
“And what happened?”
“My father had warned me of such a possibility,” the girl said gravely.
“After his death, suspecting that she had been responsible, I made certain preparations.
When Luroa came, I was ready.
It was not she who won, but I.”
Giles Habibula surged to his feet and pulled her unceremoniously to him and set a very enthusiastic kiss upon her lips.
“Good for you, lass!” he cried.
“So you beat the android at her own mortal game?