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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.
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.
In many cases, their children were mutants not monsters, although there were many of them, too, which did not survive but humans who were immune to radioactivity." "An interesting theory, Kradzy Zago," the soldier commented. "And one which conforms both to what we know of atomic energy and to the ancient legends. Then you would say that those radiations are still deadly to the non-immune?"
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.
Then, apparently changing the subject, Kradzy Zago asked: "Tell me, Zarvas Pol; have you never heard the legends of the Deadly Radiations?" General Zarvas smiled. "Who has not? Every cadet at the Officers' College dreams of re-discovering them, to use as a weapon, but nobody ever has.
"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.
It was not until he had gotten two hundred yards from the machine that he stopped, realizing what had happened. The machine, of course, had been sabotaged. That would have been young Zoldy, whom he had killed, or that old billy-goat, Kradzy Zago; the latter, most likely.
You've hit it!" "You mean...?" Kradzy Zago began. "Yes. You all know of it. It's stood for nobody knows how many millennia, and nobody's ever decided what it was, to begin with, except that somebody, once, filled a valley with concrete, level from mountain-top to mountain-top. The accepted theory is that it was done for a firing-stand for the first Moon-rocket.
"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?"
And then, I'd cover his body with a mass of concrete bigger than this palace." "Precisely." Kradzy Zago smiled. "And the military commanders and political leaders of the First Century were no less ruthless or efficient than you. You know how atomic energy was first used?
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