"Take it easy," said Gedner. He took Leo's arm in a sure grip, turned
him about and walked him firmly to the door. "You're all worked up,
Doc. You need a bit of sleep." As if in a dream Leo walked on through
the doorway; Gedner watched him go, pressed the stud that closed the
door, and turned a key in the lock.
Leila felt herself white and shaking from the reaction, and angrier
thereby. It was a minute before she could command her voice; then she
told Paul Gedner what he was, in terms that Leo Chaikoski would never
have thought of, in English, Spanish, and Martian.
Gedner laughed, thrusting the key into his pocket. "You're all right.
But for about two seconds I'll bet you thought Big Bill was going to
carry you off, like the gorillas do the beautiful white girls in the
story books. Bill could hardly have a gorilla's motives, though--the
Woollies reproduce by budding when you feed them phosphorus. He
couldn't even eat you alive; you'd probably poison him. That's not a
crack; it's metabolism."
Leila was relatively calm again. "I think it's my bedtime too," she
said frozenly. "I'm tired from my trip--and this friendly reception--"
"Not yet," insisted Gedner. "We ought to have a lot to talk about. It's
been a long time since I saw you." He added, "Or any woman, for that
matter." His eyes fell on the teacup, which had toppled unnoticed from
the arm of Leila's chair and rolled away across the floor. "You didn't
drink your tea.... Maybe you'd like something more stimulating?" He
bent to open a drawer of the file-cabinet and take out a half-filled
bottle.
"No," the girl said sharply. Gedner shrugged, and put the bottle back.
He crossed the room and leaned against the wall beside Big Bill,
letting a hand rest on the great Woolly's flattened head and running
his fingers idly through the fine white hair. Leila could not face the
intent, identical gaze in the eyes of man and monster.
* * * * *
Abruptly Gedner said, "That little crackpot was talking to you, wasn't
he?" At the girl's nod, he went on, "He's not particularly sane. They
get that way, out in these stations."
She looked at him at last. "He seems to be about as sane as you are,
Paul."
"So you think I'm crazy?" said Gedner amusedly.
A surge of anger nerved Leila. "You've always been a little crazy. Now
I think you're crazy a lot. Power-crazy."
"That's right," answered the man unexpectedly. Something glowed in his
black eyes, smothering the mocking light; he straightened. "And I've
got it, now. Here--as you've seen--I'm the boss. And that's not all."
"That's not all!" echoed Leila with a scornful laugh. "Wait till the
Company investigators get here. Where will your little kingdom be then?"
"We won't be here to meet them," said Gedner readily. "The _Zodiac_
will be back here inside sixty hours. It won't be hard--with the
Woollies' help--to commandeer her."
"Now I know you're crazy!" But there was a doubt behind her
incredulity. In the confident figure of Gedner she saw the author of
the fear and menace that had spread out from this remote moon to grip
the whole Saturnian Subsystem. But the _why_ was still unanswered.
"I'm glad you showed up here, Leila darling," he was saying. "I'd
intended to catch up with you before you got out of the moons,
anyway--but you've saved me a lot of trouble. From now on, you're going
along with me."
Leila knew a sinking sensation, but she rallied bravely. "What do you
think you're going to do--convert the _Zodiac_ into a pirate warship,
with a Woolly crew? Those days are gone."
"Nothing so stupid; she'll go on schedule to Titan. I've made some
discoveries, and I intend to use them. People have been using Woollies
for fifty years, and nobody has realized their full possibilities. I'd
already begun to a year ago, when I took this job on this God-forsaken
rock; and here I've had the leisure and the opportunity to work the
possibilities out."
"For murder?" asked Leila bluntly.
"I had to get rid of Chandler--he had one of those single-track minds
full of ideas about 'loyalty to the company' and so on--But I see
you don't understand. Yet you must know better than I do just what's
happened in the Subsystem since I sent out the news that one Woolly
had killed one man." He paused, and when she did not answer, "Panic,
financial collapse, the whole system starts falling to pieces. Before
long, there are going to be more such incidents--not on Phoebe this
time, but on Titan, right in the heart of Saturnian civilization. You
can imagine what will happen then. Now suppose, in the midst of the
turmoil, appears a small group of men who have learned to control
the Woollies, fully control, so that no untrained human mind can
challenge their commands. Like I control Big Bill." He gestured at
the immobile monster. "Look at him; he thinks only what I think, he
wants only what I want--never before did two hearts beat so completely
as one.... Suppose, then, that this group--a few friends and I--take
over the central offices of the Company, and incidentally the Colonial
Government. Then, of course, the secret can come out: that Woollies
don't run wild, they don't kill unless they're ordered to, and they
won't be ordered to kill anybody who stays in line and does as he's
told. There'll be a general sigh of relief, and nobody will worry about
the change of administrations."
Leila sat very still, assimilating the picture his words built up. It
wasn't impossible; it was the ancient pattern of successful revolution:
first bring in chaos, then out of the chaos a new order of brutal
force. There was only one flaw.... She laughed.
"It ought to work very nicely, Paul. Until the Earth Government hears
about it and send a couple of battleships to blast you out of the
Universe."
Gedner grinned confidently. "But Earth is in opposition, beyond the
Sun. It'll take over two weeks for a ship to get there, if any escapes
before we seize the ports. And by the time they can get any Fleet units
here, we'll be ready for them, with men recruited--there will be plenty
willing to join us--and the defenses of the major moons could stand off
half a dozen battleships. They won't dare bomb the cities because of
the civilian populations--"
"War with Earth?" cried Leila unbelievingly. _That_ was preposterous,
unheard-of.
"Why not? In a year, two years, I'll be stronger than Earth!"
* * * * *
Leila stared at him again. "The population of the moons is about
twenty million. Earth has over three billion," she recited as if in a
classroom. "'Stronger than Earth'?"
"Your thinking in terms of population figures," said Gedner, "is very
crude. Don't you know what the real strength of Earth has been for the
past three hundred years? Not a mass of three billion people--but ten
or a dozen battleships, the backbone of the fleet. Do you know what
a star-class battleship is? A thousand feet of hull, tungsten-alloy
armor ten feet thick, twenty-six-gravity mercury engines, fifteen
to twenty-one atomic blast guns, a thousand tons or so of atomic
explosives. Those are the surface features--but what matters is that
they're the biggest carriers and distributors of pure energy that have
ever operated in the Solar System. And they remain effective as long as
there's atomic energy to power their weapons."
"I know all that," said the girl impatiently.
"All right. What you evidently don't know is that right now, in the
year of civilization 745, Earth is almost at the end of its supply of
power metals. They've been importing Martian power--solar power--for
the last two decades, hoarding their own dwindling stores of the heavy
elements, in case of war, and at the same time trying to build up the
domestic helio-dynamic plants. But it's plain that Earth hasn't the
power to fight a major war at present."
"A major war?" said Leila helplessly. "What makes you think it would
take a major war to smash your scheme?"
"Evidently," said Gedner, "Doc Chaikoski didn't tell you all he knows."
Leila remembered, with a queer chill, the sentence that had been
interrupted by Gedner's return. She opened her mouth and closed it
without saying anything. Gedner, who had been pacing up and down paused
and gave her a long, intent look.
"I intended you to know, in any case. You'll go with me to Kroniopolis,
as soon as the _Zodiac_ comes back.... Leila, my love, this moon is
lousy with uranium."
"That can't be true!" cried Leila, but her voice shook. "The
scientists--the whole theory of planetary origins--"
"You've been reading your own Science and Progress supplements.
Certainly, the theory says there can't be any heavy metals on the
surfaces of the major planets or their moons. But Phoebe isn't a moon
of Saturn. Look at its retrograde revolution! It wandered in a long
time ago from somewhere nearer the Sun, and wherever it came from there
was plenty of uranium. That's the way Chaikoski explained it, at least.
He happened onto a deposit the last time he went prospecting for jade,
and once he knew what to look for, he found three more. And that's just
a sample of what there must be. With that, and the Woollies--Do you see
now?"
"Yes ... I see," answered Leila slowly. She raised her blond head and
met Gedner's look steadfastly. "Paul ... did you ever read any history?
About six hundred years ago, there was a man called Hitler, who had
ideas a lot like yours. He got pretty far with them too, because he
had the same advantages you count on: better weapons than anybody else
in the world, and a whole nation of people that were almost like the
Woollies, trained to obey and not to think. But what happened to him--"
"Isn't going to happen to me," interrupted Gedner, unimpressed. "I've
got enough imagination to see where history is heading _now_--not six
hundred years ago--and the brains to make a good thing of it. Earth
is done for; Saturn and Mars are going to be the next centers of the
Solar System. And inside the next couple of weeks I'm going to be the
boss of Saturn." He was smiling triumphantly down at the girl as she
sat in the armchair. For the moment, staggered by Gedner's dream of
conquest, Leila had forgotten her own present situation; now, with a
tremor, she realized that he was very close.
"How are you going to like being Queen of Saturn, Leila?" he asked
softly.
"I ... don't know," faltered the girl, rising stiffly, mechanically to
her feet as she spoke. Gedner laid a hand on her arm, but she jerked
away and retreated from him. "You'd better let me think that over."
Gedner's smile twisted down at one corner; his intense gaze followed
her slim figure in the scanty white costume, and his eyes narrowed. "I
didn't ask you whether you wanted to be Queen of Saturn. I asked you
how you were going to like it."
"It doesn't sound like my kind of a job," said Leila. As she spoke, she
was still moving cautiously away, keeping her eyes on him. But at the
last moment, Gedner saw where she was going, and swore in fury as he
flung himself forward.
"The job's yours," he muttered, "and you start now!" She fought, but
his arms were about her with a strength that seemed to equal that of
the giant Woolly. When he tried to kiss her panting mouth, she bit his
cheek until the blood ran, but he only laughed and swung her clear of
the floor. He twisted a hand in her blond hair, pulled her head back
and bent to plant a savage kiss on her throat instead.
Suddenly the girl stopped struggling; her eyes dilated, looking past
Gedner's shoulder. In a smothered whisper she exclaimed, "Paul--_look
out_!"
[Illustration: _In a smothered whisper she exclaimed, "Paul--look
out!"_]
* * * * *
The urgency in her voice made him glance up; in an instant he had
released her and spun around. To face Big Bill, who had silently risen
half-erect and as silently advanced upon the two. The Woolly's flat
head was sunk between his shoulders; his huge three-fingered hands
dangled below his shaggy knees, and almost all his resemblance to a man
was lost. His red eyes glinted coldly in the bright light.
As Gedner wheeled, Big Bill halted his stealthy approach. He reared
abruptly to his full seven feet of height, then slowly raised his great
mitten-like hands.
Leila, in a dazed huddle on the floor, saw the first look of utter
stupefaction on Gedner's face replaced by one of scowling mental
effort--and then by a dawning horror. Big Bill sank into a tense
crouch. Then Gedner threw himself sidewise, and his hand came up with
the gun; and in that instant Big Bill went for him in one terrible
rolling rush.
Before the man's finger could jerk the firing lever, one of those huge
three-fingered hands closed on his forearm. There was a snapping, and
the flame pistol spun away; Gedner screamed out in agony then, and once
again as the Woolly lifted him into the air to smash him down against
the iron floor.
That was all. Big Bill stood quietly, a stooping white-furred figure
with dangling hands, over a red thing on the floor that squirmed
painfully and was still. In the silence the sobbing gasps of Leila's
own breathing rang in her ears.
Knuckles crashed against the door panels, and Mark Paige's voice came
in, edged with anxiety--"Hey, Paul!" Leila stirred from her stunned
apathy and picked herself off the floor; and then she did the bravest
action of her life.
With heart banging against her front teeth, she walked across the room
and knelt beside the shattered body. The great red eyes of the Woolly
looked dully down at her. Fortunately, the key was in the first and
most accessible pocket.
It took her several tries, with her back to Big Bill, to fit it into
the lock. She had picked up the flame pistol and held it in her left
hand, pointing away from the door at a wavering angle; that was just as
well, for Paige's headlong entry when the door slid open nearly tripped
her taut nerves into pulling the trigger.
"Hey!" said Paige again in a low voice. His eyes fell on Leila's
shaking hand, and he reached across to take the gun away from her and
aim it pointblank at Big Bill. There was a strong odor of liquor on his
breath, but his hand holding the pistol was perfectly steady. "Shall I
shoot him?" he asked almost casually.