“God!” cried Lynn and in a frenzy of haste thrust his blaster out toward Breckenridge and fired. The Security man’s neck vanished; the torso fell; the head dropped, thudded against the floor and rolled crookedly.
Lynn moaned, “I didn’t understand, I thought he was a traitor. Nothing more.”
And Laszlo stood immobile, mouth open, for the moment incapable of speech.
Lynn said, wildly. “Sure, he warned them. But how could he do so while sitting in that chair unless he were equipped with built-in radio transmission? Don’t you see it? Breckenridge had been in Moscow. The real Breckenridge is still there. Oh my God, there were eleven of them.”
Laszlo managed a hoarse squeak. “Why didn’t he explode?”
“He was hanging on, I suppose, to make sure the others had received his message and were safely destroyed. Lord, Lord, when you brought the news and I realized the truth, I couldn’t shoot fast enough. God knows by how few seconds I may have beaten him to it.”
Laszlo said, shakily, “At least, we’ll have one to study.” He bent and put his fingers on the sticky fluid trickling out of the mangled remains at the neck end of the headless body.
Not blood, but high-grade machine oil.
Colophon
Short Science Fiction
was compiled from short stories published between and by
Isaac Asimov.
This ebook was produced for
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Provincetown,
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