Then Yet Arliess' voice fell hard and deadly on that triumphant moment.
"Mury. Cut the drive!"
Mury's attention snapped to the astrogator. Even so with the back of his head to Ryd, the latter could see the slow tensing of his spare body, the sudden immobility that took him. Ryd froze.
"You'd better think twice, Arliess," said Mury in a low, brittle tone.
"Cut the drive," ordered Arliess again. "This is journey's end, Mury. If you don't cut it now, we'll all die."
Ryd inched forward in his seat; his fingers, numbed as if the cold of sheer space had crept into the cabin, found the release. Then he was able to see Arliess, hunched forward close to his control board. One hand clenched over the magnet rheostat; but something had gone wrong. The astrogator had bent the synthyl handle out and away from its contacts; and now something gleamed half-hidden in his hand. Its ends were almost touching the inner contact of the switch handle and the minimum-resistance tap of the rheostat coil—a short piece of bared silver wire, whose placing between those contacts would send current leaping through the shortened circuit and pouring full into the magnet coils. It would envelop Shahrazad and power cylinder in a field of great intensity—but of brief duration, a fractional instant before the equilibrium of the stored atoms toppled and towship and cargo shell, together like one, vanished in one exploding flame, brighter than the Sun.
This was the end. Mury was beaten, and of course he, Ryd, was beaten too. For keeps, this time. With maudlin self-pity, he saw himself as one caught and singled out for destruction by the gods in the machine.
"Cut the drive," repeated Arliess for the third time.
Still the Panclast did not move, and his face betrayed none of what he must feel of the terrible irony by which a bit of wire, a short circuit, could wreck the plan that was to have shaken a planet. He said without stirring, "You can't use bluff on me, Arliess."