The other two were Kark Al, the thin, wisp-like, spectacled little Martian salesman whom Crane had heard complaining about his machinery samples; and Donn Ennimer, the handsome, drunken young Earthman he had noticed when he boarded ship.
The young Earthman had apparently been imbibing further of the intoxicating blue vibrations at the bar. He was talking with drunken owlishness, to the table at large.
'The service at this table is unspeakable!' Kark Al, the little Martian, told Crane indignantly. 'We've been waiting a quarter hour. I'm going to speak to the captain-'
Crane only half listened to their voices. The TSS man was keenly studying the Jovian and Saturnian. He was remembering how the necks of the men in Doctor Alph's house had been broken with one snap.
Only a Jovian or Saturnian had the physical strength to do such a thing! And these two were the only representatives of their worlds in the dining saloon. Was one of them the man with whom Crane was struggling blindly? His heart began to beat a little faster.
'This is my table, isn't it? My name is Lalla Dee,' an uncertain, girlish voice said.
It was a Venusian girl who was claiming the last empty chair at the table. She was young and pretty. She wore a white silk dress, and her dark eyes were shining with naive excitement as she looked over the glittering saloon. Crane introduced everyone to her.
'This is my first trip off Venus,' Lalla Dee told Crane shyly. 'I just won a contest in college — the first prize was a trip to Earth. Isn't it wonderful — people of five different worlds right at this table!'
Crane smiled and said, 'Yes, and all of them hungry. It looks as though our steward had forgotten us completely.'
'It's an outrage!' declared Kark Al angrily.
'Not gonna wait any longer for steward. I'm hungry,' the drunken young Earthman, Ennimer, said owlishly.
And calmly the drunk took one of the exquisite Venusian flame orchids from the center vase, salted it, and began to eat it. Lalla Dee giggled, and Kark Al snorted in disgust.
Crane had not taken his eyes off the Jovian and Saturnian. Jurk Usk sat in the same surly, unmoved silence, but Crane thought that the Saturnian was under tension, that something lurked behind those pale, big-pupiled eyes. Was Kin Nilga his man?
'I was a little afraid to come alone on this trip, but now-' The girl's voice broke off as a scream of awful agony ripped the gay chatter of the saloon and froze everyone into horrified silence.
The scream came from the throat of the drunken young Earthman who had been eating the orchid. The man's lax handsome face was contorted now in agony, his eyes protruding, his body arched half out of his chair, his hands clawing the air.
Another ghastly shriek bubbled from his throat into the frozen silence. Then he crashed down across the table.
Diners sprang to their feet, shouting hoarsely. Stewards and officers came running toward the table. Rab Crane bent swiftly over the young man's body, sniffed at the strange odor that rose from his lips.
Crane straightened, reached for the salt-cellar on the table, sniffed it. His tablemates watched frozenly.
'He's dead — poisoned!' Crane said, finally.
As an officer stooped to lift the body, 'Don't touch him with your bare hands!' Crane cried.
For the body of the poisoned man was beginning to glow faintly, his face giving off a feeble, eerie white light!
'Gods of Mars!' cried little Kark Al horrifiedly. 'Look at that body — look-'
'This man was poisoned with a super-powerful radium salt,' Rab Crane declared to the horrified officers. 'He died instantly in awful agony and his whole body is charged with radioactive force now and will have to be handled with lead gloves. Someone substituted the radium salt for the ordinary salt in this salt shaker.'
Lalla Dee looked up at Crane with wide, terrified dark eyes.
'Then maybe it was someone trying to kill you,' she said. 'The poison couldn't have been intended for any of the rest of us.'
Crane knew what she meant. Only Earthmen, out of all the Solar System's peoples, were habitual users of salt. He knew well that the poison had been intended for him — and that someone at this table had made the substitution!
Yet he said, shaking his head, 'There's no reason why anyone would want to kill me. I'm just an ordinary importer. No, this young fellow must have had some enemy who took this means to kill him.'
'I'll swear that I filled that cellar with ordinary salt today!' said the table-steward hoarsely.
'The whole affair will have to be investigated by the captain,' the third mate of the Vulcan said crisply, 'meanwhile send for a hospital detail to remove this man's body.'
As the body was carried out by leadgloved attendants, Kark Al said sickly:
'I–I guess I'm not hungry after all. I'm going to my cabin.'
'I don't want to eat now either,' the white-faced Lalla Dee told Rab Crane. 'That awful scream-'
In fact, they had all risen from the table except Jurk Usk, the Jovian, who kept his seat and was awaiting his dinner with the surly immobility of his race.
Rab Crane, as he followed the girl toward the door of the noticed that Kin Nilga was already disappearing ahead of them. The Saturnian seemed in a hurry.
Crane's mind was working 'swiftly. Someone at their table had Doctor Alph's brain. And that someone had tried twice, now, to kill him. Of those two things he was certain. But which one? He thought of those snapped necks — the huge physical strength of the Jovian and Saturnian.
He lingered behind Lalla Dee.
'Can you tell me which person at our table came into the dining saloon first tonight?' he asked the shaken table-steward.
'Kin Nilga, the Saturnian gentleman, sir. He was first at the table.'
'I want to ask him if he noticed anyone lurking by the table when he entered,' Crane said, and went on after the Venusian girl.
But as he moved along the dark promenade deck with Lalla Dee, Crane's excitement was mounting. Kin Nilga, then, had had the best chance of any of them to plant that deadly poison. And Kin Nilga also had the great physical strength that killer must have had.
Was the solemn-faced Saturnian the diabolical agent who had stolen the brain of Doctor Alph? Crane resolved to find out this very night!
Lalla Dee had stopped by the transparent glassite wall of the deck, and Crane saw that she was still shivering.
'That poor young man's face — I'll never forget it!' she said, her dark eyes clouded with horror. 'I feel as if there is some horrible monster on this ship, lurking, hidden-'
'Nonsense! Whoever adopted that devilish method of murder was after one man,' Crane told her. 'And he' be caught within a few hours.' And to distract her attention, he pointed through the glassite wall. 'There's a sight you'll never see on Venus.'
She looked, and clapped her hands in entranced delight. In the vast black firmament of space burned the eternal stars, glorious blazing jewel in dark space. The ship was rushing through a constellated wilderness of suns. The rocket-tubes had been shut off and only the steady beat-beat-beat of the ventilation pumps came along the dark deck where Crane and the girl stood.
'It's unreal!' Lalla Dee cried. 'I've often dreamed what it would be like to see the stars that we can never see through the cloudy skies of Venus, but I didn't dream it was like this.'
She pointed to a calm, green speck of light shining large and bright, almost due ahead of the ship.
'That's Earth, isn't it? Is it really as beautiful as everyone says?'
'I'm an Earthman, and my opinion is biased,' Crane nodded. 'But I think it's the most beautiful world in the System. Its snowy mountains and deep blue seas; its green fields and quiet forests and rivers and old cities — yes, it's beautiful. Beautiful and worth fighting for, worth dying for-'
