FullReads

Negu Mah sipped pensively at his drink.

“If she had only told me,” he murmured. “If she had only come to me and said she desired her freedom. If they had only both come together and faced me, saying that though it meant giving up all they had, they wanted only each other! I would have been generous. I would have been indulgent. But they did not. They had not the courage. They were afraid of me. And they hated me.”

Negu Mah was silent for a moment. Both he and his guest stared toward the graceful shaft of the Vulcan, now fully silhouetted against the whole tremendous bulk of Jupiter, sitting like a titanic scarlet egg upon the horizon of Callisto. The Jupiter light flooded the vitrite garden, gave the plants there, chosen with an eye to this, strange, exotic, glowing colors, flushed Negu Mah and Sliss with a ruby radiance.

Towards that dark, waiting craft the two they had watched were even now stealing, tense with the weight of their daring and their crime. In a moment they would reach her, enter her, actuate machinery that was miraculous in its complex simplicity, and be gone then on the wings it gave them into the concealing embrace of universal space.

“You see, my friend Sliss,” Negu Mah said finally, “Nanlo is beautiful, but there is nothing within. Her beauty deceived me. I thought that where such loveliness existed, there must be a soul to animate it. I was wrong. She is like an imitation gem–beautiful on the surface, paste within. Yet the mistake was mine, and I did not blame her. I indulged her, and still hoped that something real would bloom within her.”

He drained the molkai in his mug, one great gulp, and slumped back.

“The young man, too, Hugh Neils. I thought he would be a companion for her. But he too is weak. Yet they say they love each other. They swear–we heard them–that they want only each other and their love for all time.”

Sliss blinked, twice, and Negu Mah nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “If they carry out their plans as we heard them, that feeling will soon go. The sale of the Vulcan, even as stolen property, would give them many credits. After that–luxury, self-indulgence. And their natures are too weak to withstand the ravages of such things. So I have been troubled to know what to do.

“You see, my friend from Venus, though I would have let Nanlo go had she asked me, my own honor is at stake when she seeks to deal me an injury by slipping away in the night, and stealing from me the Vulcan. She is doing evil, and must be punished. The young man, too–indulgent as I am, I can not let him dishonor me thus without paying any penalty.”

Sliss’ eye membranes shut, questioningly.

“Yet,” the uranium merchant went on, “I have a fondness for Nanlo. I will not prevent her from doing as she has chosen to do, for the intent would still be there, and knowing it as I do, all between us is over. I can not aid her to fulfill her plans, either, for that is to injure her and myself too. But there is another course. I have chosen that.”

He gestured with one plump hand toward the silhouetted ship.

“I believe they have entered the Vulcan,” he announced. “I saw light as the entrance port opened then.”

The amphibian’s great, frog head nodded agreement.

“So,” Negu Mah continued, “I have decided to exercise what indulgence I can in the face of the injury they would do me. They shall have their chance.”

He fell silent again. Sliss leaned forward in his tub. Both of them watched intently. A flare of greenish light had sprung up beneath the black pillar that was the Vulcan. For just an instant the freighter stood there, green radiance expanding around her. Then she leaped into the sky.

With her leap, she seemed to suck the radiance along. It became a great cone of glowing light that, arrow-like, raced away upward. For a long instant the black length of the ship, and the greenish fan of flame, were outlined against the scarlet background of Jupiter. Then the freighter rocket, flinging herself upward at three gravities or better, passed the edge of the planet and vanished.