He paused, and when he resumed it was as though he, and not Grant, were on the defensive. “I’ve never exactly liked you, Grant, but I’ve often admired you and that’s why I’m sorry it’s come to this. I admired you most of all the day the ship was hit.” He seemed to have difficulty finding his words: he avoided Grant’s eyes. “I didn’t behave well then. I’ve always been quite sure, complacent really, that I’d never lose my nerve in an emergency—but then it happened right beside me, something I understood instantly and had always thought to be impossible—happened so suddenly, so loud, that it bowled me over.”
He attempted to hide his embarrassment with humor.
“Of course I should have remembered—practically the same thing happened on my first trip. Spacesickness, that time . . . and I’d been supremely confident it couldn’t happen to me. Probably made it worse. But I got over it.” He met Grant’s eyes again. “And I got over this . . . and then I got the third big surprise of my life. I saw you, of all people, beginning to crack.”
Grant flushed angrily, but McNeil met him sharply.
“Oh yes, let’s not forget the business of the wines. No doubt that’s still on your mind. Your first good grudge against me. But that’s one thing I don’t regret. A civilized man should always know when to get drunk. And when to sober up. Perhaps you wouldn’t understand.”
Oddly, that’s just what Grant was beginning to do, at last. He had caught his first real glimpse of McNeil’s intricate and tortured personality and realized how utterly he had misjudged him. No—misjudged was not the right word. In some ways his judgment had been correct. But it had only touched the surface; he had never suspected the depths that lay beneath.
And in his moment of insight Grant understood why McNeil was giving him a second chance. This was nothing so simple as a coward trying to reinstate himself in the eyes of the world: no one need ever know what happened aboard Star Queen. And in any case, McNeil probably cared nothing for the world’s opinion, thanks to the sleek self-sufficiency that had so often annoyed Grant. But that very self-sufficiency meant that at all costs he must preserve his own good opinion of himself. Without it life would not be worth living; McNeil had never accepted life save on his own terms.
McNeil was watching Grant intently and must have guessed that Grant was coming near the truth. He suddenly changed his tone, as if sorry he had revealed so much of his own character. “Don’t think I get some quixotic pleasure from turning the other cheek,” he said sharply, “it’s just that you’ve over-looked some rather basic logical difficulties. Really, Grant—didn’t it once occur to you that if only one of us survives without a covering message from the other, he’ll have a very uncomfortable time explaining what happened?”
Grant was dumbstruck. In the depths of his seething emotions, in the blindness of his fury, he had simply failed to consider how he was going to exculpate himself. His righteousness had seemed so . . . so self evident.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” he murmured. Still, he privately wondered if a covering message was really all that important in McNeil’s thoughts. Perhaps McNeil was simply trying to convince him that his sincerity was based on cold reason.
Nevertheless, Grant felt better now. All the hate had drained out of him and he felt—almost—at peace. The truth was known and he accepted it. That it was rather different from what he had imagined hardly seemed to matter.
“Well, let’s get it over,” he said, unemotionally. “Don’t we still have that new pack of cards?”
“Yes, a couple of them in the drawer there.” McNeil had taken off his jacket and was rolling up his shirtsleeves.
“Find the one you want—but before you open it, Grant,”
he said with peculiar emphasis, “I think we’d better speak to Port Hesperus. Both of us. And get our complete agreement on the record.”
Grant nodded absently; he did not mind very much now, one way or the other. He grabbed a sealed pack of the metallized cards from the game drawer and followed McNeil up the corridor to the flight deck. They left the glinting poison bottles floating where they were.
Grant even managed a ghost of a smile when, ten minutes later, he drew his card from the pack and laid it face upward beside McNeil’s. It fastened itself to the metal console with a faintly perceptible snap.
McNeil fell silent. For a minute he busied himself lighting a fresh cigarette. He inhaled the fragrant, poisonous smoke deeply. Then he said, “And the rest you already know, Inspector.”
“Except for a few minor details,” Sparta said coolly.
“What became of the two bottles, the real poison and the other?”
“Out the airlock with Grant,” he replied shortly. “I thought it would be better to keep things simple, not run the risk of a chemical analysis—revealing traces of salt, that kind of thing.”
Sparta brought a package of metallized playing cards from her jacket pocket. “Do you recognize these?” She handed them to him.
He took them in his large, curiously neat hands, hardly bothering to look at them. “They could be the ones we used. Or others like them.”
“Would you mind shuffling the pack, Mr. McNeil?”
The engineer glanced at her sharply, then did as he was told, expertly shuffling the thin, flexible cards in midair between his curved palms and nimble fingers. Finished, he “You do it.”
He laid the deck on the nearby lamp table and swiftly moved the top section of the deck to one side, then placed the bottom section on top of it. He leaned away. “What now?”
“Now I’d like you to shuffle them again.”
The look on his face, as blank as he could make it, nevertheless barely concealed his contempt. He had shared one of the more significant episodes of his life with her, and her response was to ask him to play games—no doubt in some feeble attempt to trick him into something. But he shuffled the cards quickly, making no comment, letting the hiss and snarl of their separation and swift recombination make the comment for him. “And now?”
“Now I’ll choose a card.”
He fanned the deck and held it toward her. She reached for it but let her fingers hover over the cards, moving back and forth as if she were trying to make up her mind. Still concentrating, she said, “You’re quite expert at handling these, Mr. McNeil.”
“Nor have I made a secret of it, Inspector.”
“It was no secret to begin with, Mr. McNeil.” She tugged a card from the edge of the deck and held it up, toward him, without bothering to look at it herself.
He stared at it, shocked.
“That would be the jack of spades, wouldn’t it, Mr.
McNeil? The card you drew against Commander Grant?”
He barely whispered yes before she plucked another card from the deck he still rigidly held out to her. Again she showed it to him without looking at it. “And that would be the three of clubs. The card Grant drew, which sent him to his death.” She flipped the two cards onto the bed. “You can put the deck down now, Mr. McNeil.”
His cigarette burned unnoticed in the ashtray. He had already anticipated the point of her little demonstration, and he waited for her to make it.
“Metallized cards aren’t allowed in professional play for a simple reason,” she said, “with which I’m sure you’re quite familiar. They aren’t as easy to mark with knicks and pinholes as the cardboard kind, but it’s a simple matter to impose a weak electric or magnetic pattern on them that can be picked up by an appropriate detector. Such a detector can be quite small—small enough, say, to fit into a ring like the one you’re wearing on your right hand. That’s a handsome piece—Venusian gold, isn’t it?”
It was handsome and intricate, portraying a man and woman embracing; if examined closely, in fact, it was more than a little curious. Without hesitating, McNeil twisted the heavy sculpted ring over his knuckle. It came off easily, for his finger was thinner than it had been a week ago. He held it out to her, but to his surprise, she shook her head— —and smiled. “I don’t need to look at it, Mr. McNeil.
The only coherent patterns on these cards were imposed by me, a few minutes ago.” She leaned away from him, relaxing in her chair, inviting him to relax as well. “I used other methods to determine which cards had been drawn by you and Grant. They were the only two cards in the deck which seemed to have been handled beyond a light shuffle. Frankly, I was partly guessing.”