"You did a fine job, Cadmus," he said, looking down. "No one else but you could have accomplished it. No one else had the will, the courage, or the strength and audacity. Nor the human gullibility. That's why I used you."
Johlan paused. He looked away from the window. A splash of white moonlight flooded down, rippled over the mosaic floor. It glinted from Johlan's scales and danced in his lidless eyes. His voice was dreamy with power. "My question to the Machine was simple. I merely devised a series of opposed questions, requiring one answer for all of them. In other words, the Machine was forced to make a compromise. But the Machine was fixed. It couldn't make a compromise. It had to go insane."
He looked back down at Cadmus. "That was a magnificent idea of your father's—those ancient tanks from the atom war. He was a great man. Maybe the greatest Terran who ever lived. But I'm a Venusian. I am greater, because I used him. And I used you, his son. So Cadmus slew the dragon and sowed its teeth, and from these sprang armed men!"
Johlan smiled gently. "But the dragon was never really slain, Cadmus. I was the dragon."
Cadmus heard the door open. He heard her voice, sharp and clear. It was beautiful, he thought, like music. Though music could never be so deadly.
"But dragons always die, Johlan."
The Venusian gasped as he turned. He started to die as he faced her. The death ray glowed on his green-scaled chest for a while, then faded as the Venusian stumbled across the room, the neutron gun hanging limply and forgotten in his webbed hand. He finished dying with his face pressed hard against the window.
Far away, Venus shimmered brightly in the sky.
She knelt beside Cadmus. Her kisses were wet on his face. He could feel her hands and her lips.