“I’ve been trying all my life to recover something of the wealth and honor that was rightly mine—and all of you have always crushed me back again, into hunger and rags and shame.”
“Eh?”
Chan looked at him sharply. “How’s that?”
“I studied science,” rasped the little man.
“I took the name of Enos Clagg, because you all had come to hate my father’s—”
“Enos Clagg?”
Chan nodded in recognition.
“And you built illegal robots!”
“Military robots,” Davian whispered huskily.
“I hoped to restore the empire with them.
But we were betrayed to the Green Hall.
The Legion tracked me down.
I served three years on Ebron—dreaming of ways to settle the score.”
Scarcely listening to him, Chan had looked back at that enormous falling machine.
Now its black mass filled half the sky.
A fantastic greenish twilight was falling fast upon the rock.
A chlorine-poisoned wind stirred suddenly.
“After I was pardoned from Ebrofi,” Davian’s bitter voice rushed on, “I saw that I must be more subtle.
I came to Earth, with a little money my mother had saved, and took the name I wear.
I met a girl, and fell in love, and married her.
She wanted me to forget my plans, and for a little while I almost did.”
His savage eyes flashed at Caspar Hannas.
“Until we visited his gambling ship,” he said.
“I had studied the mathematics of probability in my cell on Ebron.
I was hoping to win back the lost wealth of the Purples.
But Hannas robbed me.
Hannas and Brelekko and Comaine!” His cracked voice lifted wildly.
“They’ve robbed me again and again, every time I scraped up money to go back—and laughed at me because they said I was habitual.
That’s why they’re here—to watch me win one game!”
“But you have lost.”
Chan’s voice was lifted, above a sudden deep vibration in the air.
“Because the daughter of Dr. Eleroid is at the controls of your other geofractor—and evidently this rock is no longer shielded from it, since I smashed your control box.
Just look around you!
Already, the keeper and many of the rest have been returned to the System.”
All the rock was trembling now to a mighty purring.
By twos and threes, by little groups, the haggard victims of the Basilisk were vanishing.
Familiar articles of furniture, bits of Terrestrial shrubbery and sod, used to balance the circuits, showed that they had been replaced on some kinder planet.
In a few moments Chan was left alone with Abel Davian, beneath the many million tons of the falling geofractor.
“But I don’t think you’ll escape, Mr. Basilisk.”
His big hand made a hurried gesture of farewell.
“Because Stella Eleroid knows certainly, by now, that you—and not I—killed her father.”
Then that deep vibration quivered through Chan’s body.
Some pellucid screen, it seemed, had fallen between his eyes and the gray stricken face of Abel Davian. The green thickening twilight became a total darkness.
And he knew that Stella Eleroid had lifted him from the peril of the rock.
NOWHERE NEAR 1 The Man Who Liked Machines
Nowhere Near was the name of a point in space. Five black light-years from our Legion base at the closest star, sixty more from old Earth, it was marked by the laser beacon and little else.
A relief ship came once a year—when it could get through the anomaly.
The last Legion ship had not got through, and half our personnel were overdue for rotation.
Odd types, they had volunteered because they had expected to enjoy loneliness and mystery and danger.
Most of them had found long ago that they did not.