Cycle of Nemesis by Kenneth Bulmer Read Free Book Online Page A

of that, mainly, and not through any altruistic idea of giving you the globe—”
    “I offered to buy it—”
    “—for double. I know. No, Hall. You tell me why a rotor blew on your heli. Then I’ll maybe tell you what I think.”
    Brennan smiled. He looked every inch the toughly competent man of action who had faced danger a hundred times all over the worlds and satellites of the system. “I can guess, Bert, and I’ll say this—yes, you’re right.”
    I glanced quickly at Phoebe Desmond, and Brennan, following my eyes, killed his smile. “She’ll have to be counted out, that’s for sure.”
    But Phoebe Desmond was not so easi ly written off as that. “Oh, no! ” she said with a flare of pride. “I’m coming, too.”
    “What the hell are you talking about now?” demanded Pomfret, his face puzzled.
    We all laughed. “Khamushkei the Undying doesn’t take kindly to people wanting to chain him up again, George," said Hall Brennan as though conveying the state of the game.
    “Oh!” said Pomfret. He reached for his gun.
    “What did Northrop tell you?”
    “Simply that strange events had clustered about Gannets and that this Vasil Stannard had once told his father that he had seen himself walking there many times, in company with strangers he did not know. Stannard had dug over much of the territory we had skirted on the way down to our city—”
    “And you think he dug up a link in the story of Khamushkei the Undying?” demanded Phoebe, once more rapt and absorbed by the old story.
    “Yes. And whatever it was he found is in that globe ! ”
    I looked at my globe. Well. It was important and a relic and a link with the past. But if inside it lay something incredibly more ancient that would finally give us the clue then, well ... I took out my knife and handed it hilt first to Brennan.
    “Be my guest.”
    Brennan chuckled his appreciation. “If Vasil Stannard was digging around near where that old story of Khamushkei the Undying was found, he could easily have uncovered details of it that would, by definition, have precluded our finding them. Whatever it was, if it bears on my search, that will be enough for me.”
    I nodded at the knife, guessing that Brennan, after all his searchings had at last brought him within sight of his goal, now had those last minute reluctances to go on and uncover the secret, lest it prove false. Or, with the irrationality of mankind, lest in its proof of correctness it destroy some spark of his own fire to find out. The search is often more rewarding than the eventual
    “Go on, Hall.” Phoebe Desmond could barely keep still with excitement.
    Brennan took my knife and poised it over the globe.
    “Be as gentle as you can, Hall....”
    The feather-like tickle of there being something wrong now stirred my mental activities into sudden action; my arm thrust up and I caught Brennan’s descending forearm with my hand forming a crutch and taking the downward jolt. He reacted with startled surprise.
    "What the—?”
    “Just a minute, Hall. Look at this globe. It’s supposed to contain a clue left there by Vasil Stannard, something he dug up that you missed, or that he found close by that you never got to—and yet the globe was made a few hundred years ago, that’s clear—”
    “Anyone can see that.” Brennan showed his frustration.
    “Well, if you look carefully you’ll see the original plastic print is undamaged. The globe hasn’t been tampered with, nothing can be inside.”
    “What!”
    "But what about Northrop?” demanded Phoebe, incensed.
    “What about him,” I said tartly—more tartly than I meant. I felt I was protecting my property. “I’ll be the first to open up the globe—but we’ll do it without damage to it. That fair?”
    “Suppose,” said Pomfret with an amazing grasp of essentials. “Suppose we just find out what you expect to find in there, Hall.”
    Hall Brennan glared at us. We’d all accepted his story at face value, its preposterous