After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

“You were right before.” Kyto laughed in a high key. “It is amusing. Delicious! And I was a fool. A blind, patriotic fool.”

“I’m glad you told me,” Tony said suddenly. “You’re a man, Kyto. And we need you here. Need the things your race possesses.”

“Thank you,” Kyto said solemnly. “You are also a man.”

Involuntarily Tony glanced at Hendron’s cabin and shook his head.

The Japanese understood perfectly. “I hope you will not mind an expression of my sympathies?”

Tony looked at him—his valet, expressing sympathies on a most personal matter! No—a friend—a professor—a savant. A man who had heroically offered to give up his life for the beliefs that he had gained. “No, Kyto.”

“You will need courage,” Kyto said. “Courage, restraint. You have both in sufficient quantities.”

“I have rats eating my soul,” Tony answered stonily.

“It is too big for all the rats on earth.”

Tony stared at the little man and said in a curious tone, “Funny.”

There was a silence between them.

“I have more to say.” Kyto picked up a chip and opened a pocket-knife. He began to whittle as expertly as any country-store porch loafer.

“More?”

“You know that other ships for the trip to this planet were being prepared?”

“Sure. But none of them—”

Kyto shrugged. “Did you know that in what had been Manchuria the most fanatical Japanese, the Russians, and certain Germans combined to build such a ship?”

“No.”

“They were mostly extreme communists. But owing to their need of scientific experts, they took into their group many non-communists.”

“So?”

“Great men. They were as likely to succeed as you.”

Tony stared at his companion. “And you believe they did? You think they are the people who have been flying here—”

“I know.” Kyto drew an object from his pocket—a tightly folded piece of paper. On it were drawn Japanese characters. “I found this a few hours ago. I had been walking from camp. It was blowing along in the wind. It was not mine.”

“What is it?”

“A prayer—a written prayer. They are in common use in Japan.”

“It might have come on the Ark.”

“Yes. But it might not. There is no such thing in the catalogue.”

“Anybody who had traveled in Japan might have had one—in a pocketbook—and lost it.”

“Again, yes. But I know intuitively.”

“If they were Russians and Germans and Japanese—why didn’t they land, then?”

“My point in telling this! They do not want company here. They came to set up a Soviet. I have the information in detail. They were sworn, if they reached here, to set up their own government—to wipe out all who might oppose them. It is not even a government like that of Russia. It is ruthless, inhuman—a