Chambers shook his head. “I’m almost sorry you started this business, Moses.”
Allen rose, smashed out his cigarette in a tray.
“I was afraid you’d be. I hate to drop it now I’ve gone this far. It may fizzle out, but—”
“No,” said Chambers, “don’t drop it. We can’t afford to drop anything these days. You, yourself, feel almost instinctively, that it will come to nothing, but on the outside chance it may not, you must go ahead.”
“There’s just one thing more, chief,” said Allen. “I’ve mentioned it before. The people—”
Chambers flipped impatient hands. “I know what you’re going to say, Moses. They resent me. They think I’ve drawn away from them. There have been too many rumors.”
“They don’t know you’re blind,” said Allen. “They’d understand if they did know that. Better for them to know the truth than to think all the things they’re thinking. I know what they’re thinking. It’s my business to know.”
“Who would follow a blind man?” asked Chambers bitterly. “I’d gain their pity, lose their respect.”
“They’re baffled,” said Allen. “They talk about your illness, say it has changed you, never realizing it left you blind. They even say your brain is going soft. They wonder about Hannibal, ask why you never are without him. Fantastic tales have grown up about him. Even more fantastic than the truth.”
“Moses,” said Chambers, sharply, “we will talk no more about this.”
He sat stiff and straight in his chair, staring straight ahead, as Allen left.
Mrs. Templefinger’s parties always were dull. That was a special privilege she held as society leader of New York’s upper crust.
This party was no exception. The amateurish, three-dimensional movies of her trip to the Jovian moons had been bad enough, but the violinist was worse.
Cabot Bond, publisher of the Morning Spaceways, fidgeted in his chair, then suddenly relaxed and tried to look at ease as he caught Mrs. Templefinger glaring at him. She might be a snooty old dame, he told himself, and a trial to all her friends with her determined efforts to uphold the dignity of one of the Solar System’s greatest families, but it definitely was not policy to vex her. She controlled too many advertising accounts.
Cabot Bond knew about advertising accounts. He lived by them and for them. And he worried about them. He was worrying about one of them now.
The violin wailed to a stop and the guests applauded politely. The violinist bowed condescendingly. Mrs. Templefinger beamed, fingering her famous rope of Asteroid jewels so the gems caught light and gleamed with slow ripples of alien fire.
The man next to Bond leaned close.
“Great story that—about discovering the Rosetta stone of Mars,” he said. “Liked the way your paper handled it. Lots of background. Interpretative writing. None of the sensationalism some of the other papers used. And you put it on the front page, too. The Rocket stuck it away on an inside page.”
Bond wriggled uncomfortably. That particular story he’d just as soon forget. At least he didn’t want to talk about it. But the man apparently expected an answer.
“It wasn’t a stone,” Bond said icily, almost wishing the violin would start up again. “It was a scroll.”
“Greatest story of the century,” said the man, entirely unabashed. “Why, it will open up all the ancient knowledge of Mars.”
The violin shrieked violently as the musician sawed a vicious bow across the strings.
Bond settled back into his chair, returned to his worry once again.
Funny how Sanctuary, Inc. had reacted to that story about the Rosetta scroll of Mars. Almost as if they had been afraid to let it come before the public eye. Almost, although this seemed ridiculous, as if they might have been afraid of something that might be found in some old Martian record.
Perhaps he had been wrong in refusing their request to play the story down. Some of the other papers, like the Rocket, apparently had agreed. Others hadn’t, of course, but most of those were sheets which never had carried heavy Sanctuary lineage, didn’t stand to lose much. Spaceways did carry a lot of lineage. And it worried Bond.
The violin was racing now, a flurry of high-pitched notes, weaving a barbaric, outlandish pattern—a song of outer space, of cold winds on strange planets, of alien lands beneath unknown stars.
Mrs. Templefinger’s sudden scream rang through the room, cutting across the shrilling of the music.
“My jewels!” she screamed. “My jewels!”
She had surged to her feet, one hand clutching the slender chain that encircled her throat. The chain on which the Asteroid jewels had been strung.
But now the famous jewels were gone, as if some hand of magic had stripped them from the chain and whisked them into nowhere.
The violinist stood motionless, bow poised, fingers hovering over the strings. A glass tinkled as it slipped from someone’s fingers and struck the floor.
“They’re gone!” shrieked Mrs. Templefinger. “My jewels are gone!”
The butler padded forward silently.
“Perhaps I should call the police, madam,” he offered respectfully.
A strange light came over Mrs. Templefinger’s face, a soft and human light that smoothed out the lines around her eyes and suddenly made her soft and gracious instead of a glowering old dowager. For the first time in twenty years, Mrs. Templefinger smiled a gracious smile.
“No, Jacques,” she whispered. “Not the police.”
Still smiling, she sat down again, nodded to the violinist. The chain fell from her fingers, almost as if she had forgotten the jewels, almost as if a cool half million dollars’ worth of jewelry didn’t matter.
The violinist swept the bow across the strings again.
Cabot Bond rose and tiptoed softly from the room. Suddenly it had occurred to him there was something he must do—phone his editor, tell him to play down any more stories the wires might carry on the Rosetta scroll of Mars.
Harrison Kemp, head of the Solar Research Bureau on Pluto, straightened from the microscope, expelling his breath slowly.
His voice was husky with excitement. “Johnny, I really believe you’ve got it! After all these years … after—”
He stopped and stared, a stricken stare.
For Johnny Gardner had not heard him. Was not even looking at him. The man sat hunched on his stool, faint starlight from the laboratory port falling across his face, a face that had suddenly relaxed, hung loose and slack, a tired, wan face with haggard eyes and drooping jowls.
Kemp tried to speak, but his lips were dry and his tongue thick and terror dried up his words before they came. From somewhere back of him came the slow drip-drip of precious water. Outside, the black spires of Plutonian granite speared up into the inky, starry sky.
And before the port, the hunched figure of a man whose gaze went out into the alien wilderness, yet did not see the jumbled tangle that was Pluto’s surface.
“Johnny!” Kemp whispered, and the whisper frightened him as it seemed to scamper like a frightened rat around the room.
Gardner did not answer, did not move. One hand lay loosely in his lap, the other dangled at his side. One foot slipped off the rung of the stool and, just failing to reach the floor, swung slowly to and fro like a ghastly pendulum.
Kemp took a step forward, reaching out a hand that stopped short of Gardner’s shoulder.
There was no use, he knew, of trying to do anything. Johnny Gardner was gone. The hulking body still sat on the stool, but the mind, that keen, clear-cut, knifelike mind, was gone. Gone like a dusty mummy falling in upon itself. One moment a mind that could probe to the very depth of life itself—the next moment a mind that was no more than a darkening cavern filled with the hollow hooting of already half-forgotten knowledge.