Tarrano the Conqueror | Page 5

Our friendship had, if anything, grown closer since my promotion into
the business world. Yet we were as unlike as two individuals could
possibly be. I am dark-haired, slim, and of comparatively slight
muscular strength. Restless--full of nervous energy--and, they tell me,
somewhat short of temper. Georg was a blond, powerful young giant. A

head taller than I--blue-eyed, from his mother, now dead--square-jawed,
and a complexion pink and white. He was slow to anger. He seldom
spoke impulsively; and usually with a slow, quiet drawl. Always he
seemed looking at life and people with a half-humorous smile--looking
at the human pageant with its foibles, follies and frailties--tolerantly.
Yet there was nothing conceited about him. Quite the reverse. He was
generally wholly deprecating in manner, as though he himself were of
least importance. Until aroused. In our days of learning, I saw Georg
once--just once--thoroughly angered.
"... Came up promptly, didn't you?" Georg was saying. He was leading
me to the house doorway, but I stopped him.
"Let's go to the grove," I suggested. We turned down from the small
viaduct, passed the house, and went into the heavy grove of trees
nearby.
"He's hungry," Elza declared. "Jac, did you eat at the office tonight?"
"Yes," I said.
"Did you really?"
"Some," I admitted. In truth the run up here had brought me a
thoroughly hearty appetite, which I just realized.
"I was pretty busy, you know," I added. "Such a night--but don't you
bother."
But she had already scurried away toward the house. Dear little Elza! I
wished then, for the hundredth time, that I was a man of wealth--or at
least, not as poor as a tower timekeeper. True, I made fair money--but
the urge to spend it recklessly dominated me. I decided in that moment,
to reform for good; and lay by enough to justify asking a woman to be
my wife.
We reclined on a mossy bank in the grove of trees, so thick a grove that
it hid the house from our sight.

The doctor extinguished the glowing lights with which the
tree-branches were dotted. We were in the semi-darkness of a beautiful,
moonlit night.
"Don't go to sleep, Jac!"
I became aware that Georg and his father were smiling at me.
I sat up, snapping my wits into alertness. "No. Of course not. I guess
I'm tired. You've no idea what the office was like tonight. Roaring."
"I can imagine," Georg said. "You were at Park Sixty when the
President fell, weren't you?"
"Yes. But I wasn't supposed to be. I wasn't assigned to that. How did
you guess?"
"Elza saw you. She had our finder on you--I couldn't push her away
from it." His slow smile was quizzical.
"On me? In all that crowd. She must have searched about very carefully
to----"
I stopped; I could feel my cheeks burning, and was glad of the dimness
there under the trees.
"She did," said Georg.
"I sent for you, Jac," Dr. Brende interjected abstractedly, "because----"
But Georg checked him. "Not now, father. Someone--anyone--might
pick you up. Your words--or read your lips--there's light enough here to
register on a finder."
The doctor nodded. "He's afraid--you see, Jac, it's these Venus----"
"Father--please. It's a long chance--but why take any? We can insulate
in the house."

The chance that someone who shouldn't be, was tuned to us as we sat
there in that lonely grove! With the doctor's widespread reputation--his
more than national prominence--it did not seem to me to be such a long
chance either, on this, of all nights.
"As you say, no use in putting private things into the public air," I
remarked; and I felt then as though a thousand hostile eyes and ears
were watching and listening. "We can talk of what everybody knows,"
Georg commented. "The Martian Ruler of the Little People was
assassinated an hour ago. You heard that coming up?"
"No," I said; but I had imagined as much. "Did they say--"
"They said nothing," Dr. Brende put in. "The flash of a dozen helioed
words--no more."
"It went dark, like Venus?"
"No. Just discontinued. I judge they're excited up there--the Bureau
disorganized perhaps--I don't know. That was the last we got at the
house, just before you came down. There may be something in there
now--you Inter-Allied people are pretty reliable."
The ruler of the Venus Central State, the leading monarch of Mars, and
our three chief executives of Earth--murdered almost simultaneously! It
was incredible--any one of the murders would have been
incredible--yet it was true.
There had been times--in the Inter-Allied Office, particularly--when I
had been insulated from aerial eavesdropping. But never had I felt the
need of it more than now. A constraint fell over me; I seemed afraid to
say anything. I think we all three felt very much