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Even King Angus isn't crazy enough to do anything to start a war. Not yet, anyhow." "Not yet?" The captain of the Blue Comet, who was one of Count Lionel's vassal barons, was silent for a moment. "You ought to know, Prince Trask," he said. "Andray Dunnan's grandmother was the King's mother. Her father was old Baron Zarvas of Blackcliffe.
But I could not be party to such a crime as Hradzka contemplated when it lay within my power to prevent it." "The machine will take him out of our space-time continuum, or back to a time when this planet was a swirling cloud of flaming gas?" Zarvas Pol asked. Kradzy Zago shook his head. "No, the unit is not powerful enough for that. It will only take him about ten thousand years into the past.
The door at the top was open, and Zarvas Pol stepped through but there was nothing in the great spherical room except a raised dais some fifty feet in diameter, its polished metal top strangely clean and empty. And a crumpled heap of burned cloth and charred flesh that had, not long ago, been a man.
An old man with a white beard, and the seven-pointed star of the Learned Brothers on his breast, advanced to meet the armed intruders. "So he is gone, Kradzy Zago?" Zarvas Pol said, holstering his weapon. "Gone in the 'time-machine', to hide in yesterday or tomorrow. And you let him go?" The old one nodded. "He had a blaster, and I had none." He indicated the body on the floor.
As he did, a searing light filled his eyes and a wave of intolerable heat swept over him. Then darkness... "No, Zarvas Pol," Kradzy Zago repeated. "Hradzka will not return; the 'time-machine' was sabotaged." "So? By you?" the soldier asked. The scientist nodded. "I knew the purpose for which he intended it.
"Exactly. And Hradzka, his body emitting those radiations, has returned to the First Century of the Atomic Era to a world without immunity." General Zarvas' smile vanished. "Man!" he cried in horror. "You have loosed a carrier of death among those innocent people of the past!" Kradzy Zago nodded. "That is true.
There were clerks; laborers; poor but haughty nobles: and wealthy merchants who had long been forced to hide their riches from the dictator's tax-gatherers, and soldiers, and spacemen. "You'd better let some of us go first sir," General Zarvas' orderly, a blood-stained bandage about his head, his uniform in rags, suggested. "You don't know what might be up there." The General shook his head.
General Zarvas, the Army Commander who had placed himself at the head of the revolt, stood with his foot on the lowest step, his followers behind him. There was Prince Burvanny, the leader of the old nobility, and Ghorzesko Orhm, the merchant, and between them stood Tobbh, the chieftain of the mutinous slaves.
Hradzka was not content with having enslaved a whole Solar System: he hungered to bring tyranny and serfdom to all the past and all the future as well; he wanted to be master not only of the present but of the centuries that were and were to be, as well. I never took part in politics, Zarvas Pol; I had no hand in this revolt.
"Zoldy Jarv had no blaster, either, but he tried to stop Hradzka. See, he squandered his life as a fool squanders his money, getting nothing for it. And a man's life is not money, Zarvas Pol." "I do not blame you, Kradzy Zago," General Zarvas said. "But now you must get to work, and build us another 'time-machine', so that we can hunt him down." "Does revenge mean so much to you, then?"
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