Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his feet, held up a shiny metal globe. “One of us will plant this in the ship. It will be set by means of this dial—” he touched a spot on the surface of the globe with a pallid finger—“to do nothing for forty hours. Then—it will explode. Atomite.”
He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes—uncertainty, irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a mark on one of them, held it up.
“We will let chance decide who is to do the work,” he said angrily. “Is there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think. …”
No answer. Svan jerked his head. “Good,” he said. “Ingra, bring me that bowl.”
Silently the girl picked up an opaque glass bowl from the broad arm of her chair. It had held Venus-tobacco cigarettes; there were a few left. She shook them out and handed the bowl to Svan, who was rapidly creasing the six fatal slips. He dropped them in the bowl, stirred it with his hand, offered it to the girl. “You first, Ingra,” he said.
She reached in mechanically, her eyes intent on his, took out a slip and held it without opening it. The bowl went the rounds, till Svan himself took the last. All eyes were on him. No one had looked at their slips.
Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them. “This is the plan,” he said. “We will go, all six of us, in my ground car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation. The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough, after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that’s all there is to it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed.”
There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw … but still that uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: “Look at the slips!”
Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled. Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over, striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing. …
And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second’s glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance. Almost he was disappointed.
Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen one to announce it—a second, ten seconds. …
Then gray understanding came to him. A traitor!
his subconscious whispered. A coward!
He stared at them in a new light, saw their indecision magnified, became opposition.
Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting everyone, but—suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision. Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly beneath the table, marked his own slip.
In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in secret. His voice was very tired as he said, “I will plant the bomb.”
The six conspirators in Svan’s old ground car moved slowly along the main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the entrance to the town’s Hall of Justice.
“Good,” said Svan, observing them. “The delegation is still here. We have ample time.”
He half turned in the broad front seat next to the driver, searching the faces of the others in the car. Which was the coward? he wondered. Ingra? Her aunt? One of the men?
The right answer leaped up at him. They all are
, he thought. Not one of them understands what this means. They’re afraid.
He clamped his lips. “Go faster, Ingra,” he ordered the girl who was driving. “Let’s get this done with.”
She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite dark now. The car’s driving light flared yellowishly in front of them, illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done.
A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence that followed its thunderous crash, a man’s voice bellowed: “Halt!”
The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again.
“Where are you going?” he growled.
Svan spoke up. “We want to look at the Earth-ship,” he said. He opened the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle.
