"Go to hell," Duane said shortly. "I'm playing no tricks."
There was an instant's doubt in Andrias' eyes, then it flashed away. He
bent closer, peered at Duane. "I almost think--" he began.
Then he shook his head. "No," he said. "You're lying all right. You
killed Stevens to get his share--and now you're trying to hold me up.
That's your last chance that just went by, Duane. From now on, I'm
running this show!"
He spun around and strode to the door, thrust it open. "Dakin!" he
bellowed. "Reed!"
Two large, ugly men in field-gray uniforms, emblazoned with the
shooting-star insignia of Callisto's League police, came in, looking to
Andrias for instructions.
"Duane here is resisting arrest," Andrias said. "Take him along. We'll
fix up the charges later."
"You can't do that," Duane said wearily. "I'm sick. If you've got
something against me, save it. Wait till my head clears. I'm sure I can
explain--"
"Explain, hell." The dark man laughed. "If I wait, this ship will be
blasting off for Ganymede within two hours. I'll wait--but so will the
ship. It's not going anywhere till I give it clearance. I run Callisto;
I'll give the orders here!"
II
Whoever this man Andrias was, thought Duane, he was certainly a man of
importance on Callisto. As he had said, _he_ gave the orders.
The crew of the rocket made no objection when Andrias and his men took
Duane off without a word. Duane had thought the nurse, who seemed a
good enough sort, might have said something on his behalf. But she was
out of sight as they left. A curt sentence to a gray-clad official on
the blast field where the rocket lay, and the man nodded and hurried
off, to tell the rocket's captain that the ship was being refused
clearance indefinitely.
A long, powerful ground car slid up before them. Andrias got in front,
while the two uniformed men shoved Duane into the back of the car,
climbed in beside him. Andrias gave a curt order, and the car shot
forward.
The driver, sitting beside Andrias, leaned forward and readied a hand
under the dashboard. The high wail of a siren came instantly from the
car's roof, and what traffic was on the broad, straight highway into
which they had turned pulled aside to let them race through.
Ahead lay the tall spires of a city. Graceful, hundreds of feet high,
they seemed dreamlike yet somehow oddly familiar to Duane. Somewhere
he had seen them before. He dragged deep into his mind, plumbing the
cloudy, impenetrable haze that had settled on it, trying to bring forth
the memories that he should have had. Amnesia, they called it; complete
forgetting of the happenings of a lifetime. He'd heard of it--but never
dreamed it could happen to him!
_My name, it seems, is Peter Duane_, he thought. _And they tell me that
I killed a man!_
The thought was starkly incredible to him. A white-haired man, it had
been; someone named Stevens. He tried to remember.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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