Burton said, “There are nine guns trained on you. You might get one or two of us, but you’ll be blown to bits.”
The Ethical smiled grimly.
“It looks like a Mexican standoff, doesn’t it?”
He paused. “But it isn’t, believe me!”
Croomes shouted, “No, it isn’t! You Satan, you fiend from Hell!”
Her pistol boomed. The scarlet beam flashed out from Loga’s weapon at the same time that eight other guns exploded.
Loga fell backwards. Burton ran, leaped upon the revolving disc, darted over it to the fixed platform, and pointed his revolver at the prostrate Ethical. The others crowded around him.
While Turpin and Tai-Peng picked up the bleeding and ashen-skinned man from the floor, Burton seized the sphere-ended weapon. Loga was seated roughly in his chair. He held his hand over a gushing wound on the biceps of his right arm. “He got Croomes!” Alice said, pointing. Burton looked once at the severed body and turned away.
Loga looked around as if he couldn’t believe what had happened, then said, “There are three boxes in the upper-right-hand drawer in the console. Bring them to me, and I’ll be all right in a few minutes.”
“This isn’t a trick?” Burton said.
“No! I swear! I’ve had enough of tricks and murder! I meant you no harm! I just wanted you to be disarmed so that I could explain without worrying about you. You’re such a violent breed!”
“Look who’s talking,” Burton said.
“I didn’t do it because I loved it!”
“Neither did we,” Burton said, but he wasn’t so sure that he was wholly truthful.
They brought out three silver boxes set with green emeralds. Burton opened each one slowly and inspected the contents. As the Ethical had said, each contained a bottle. Two held liquid; one, some pink stuff.
“How do I know they won’t release some sort of gas?” Burton said. “Or that they aren’t poison?”
“They won’t be,” Nur said. “He does not want to die now.”
“That’s right,” Loga said. “Something terrible may happen soon, and only I know how to stop it. I may need your help.”
“You could have had it all along,” Burton said, “if only you’d told us the truth in the beginning.”
“I had my reasons for not doing so,” Loga said. “Very good reasons. And then things got out of hand.”
He squeezed one of the bottles, and a clear liquid spurted out onto his hand. After rubbing it over the wound on his shoulder, wincing at the pain, he drank from the second bottle. From the third he poured out a pink gooey substance into his left hand and then pressed it over the wound.
“The first was to sterilize the wound,” he said. “The second was to cancel the shock and give me strength. The third will heal the wound in a very short time. Three days.”
Burton said, “Where did we wound you the first time?”
“The only bad wound was in my left thigh.”
His grayness of skin had been replaced by a normal color within a minute. He asked for some water, which Frigate brought to him. Burton lit a cigarette. His questions were a logjam in his throat. Which one should be spit out first?
Before the inquisition, though, certain things had to be done. Burton held his revolver on Loga while the others brought their chairs in and Frigate made an extra trip to get Burton’s. These were placed on the floor on the side of the disc where they’d be out of sight of Croomes’ body. While this was being done, Loga was allowed to lift his bloodstained chair to a designated spot. The other chairs were then arranged closely in a semicircle facing the Ethical.
“I think we could all stand a little drink,” Burton said. Loga told them how to set the controls of a grail box to get their orders filled. His own was a yellow wine which the others had never found in their grails. Burton duplicated Loga’s request and tasted the wine. It was comparable to nothing he’d ever had before, delicate yet pungent. For some reason it evoked a slowly receding tide of dark green waters above which flew giant white birds with crimson beaks.