It was his eyes that gave him away, his eyes of rare green that from a
distance looked black. Slanting, veiled, unreadable beneath the lowered
silky lashes, there was the soul of a tiger in their sinister depths. It
was his eyes that his victims remembered....
"So you have arrived, Dr. Ku," whispered Hawk Carse, and for a second he
too smiled, with eyes as bleak and hard as frosty chilled steel. Their
glances met and held--the cold, hard, honest rapier; the subtle perfumed
poison. The other men in the cabin were forgotten; the feeling was
between these two. Strikingly contrasted they stood there: Carse, in
rough blue denim trousers, faded work-shirt, open at the neck,
old-fashioned rubber shoes and battered skipper's cap askew on his
flaxen hair; Ku Sui, suavely impeccable in high-collared green silk
blouse, full-length trousers of the same material, and red slippers, to
match the wide sash which revealed the slender lines of his waist. A
perfume hung about the man, the indescribable odor of tsin-tsin flowers
from the humid jungles of Venus.
"You see I meet you halfway, my friend," the Eurasian said with delicate
mock courtesy. "A surpassing pleasure I have anticipated for a long
time. _No, no!_ I see that already I shall have to ask you a small
favor. A thousand pardons: it's my deplorable ability to read your mind
that requires me to ask it. Your so justly famed speed on the draw might
possibly overcome this advantage"--he raised his ray-gun slightly--"and,
though I know you would not kill me--save in the direst emergency, since
you wish to take me a living prisoner--I would find it most distressing
to have to carry for the rest of my life a flaw on my body. So, may I
request you to withdraw your ray-guns with two fingertips and put them
on the floor? Observe--your fingertips. Will you be so kind?"
* * * * *
The Hawk looked at him for a minute. Then silently he obeyed. He knew
that the Eurasian would have no compunctions about shooting him down in
cold blood; but, on the other hand, even as the man had said, he could
not kill Ku Sui, but had to capture him, in order to take him to Earth
to confess to crimes now blamed on Eliot Leithgow. "Do as he says,
Friday," he instructed the still staring negro; and, like a man in a
trance, Friday obeyed.
"Thank you," the Eurasian said. "It was a most friendly thing to do." He
paused. "I suppose you are wondering how I arrived here, and why you did
not see me come. Well, I shall certainly tell you, in return for your
favor. But first--ah, friend Carse--your gesture! A reminder, I assume."
Slowly the Hawk was stroking the bangs of hair which had been trained to
obscure his forehead. There was no emotion on his chilly face as he
answered, no slightest sign of feeling unless it were a slight trembling
of the left eyelid--significant enough to those who could read it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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