Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/13

Rh over test tubes and believe all the leaders tell them! What does my rank amount to? It means I take orders direct from The Hundred instead of through a stuffed shirt. But if I show signs of original thought, I'm classed as a reactionary liable to be shadowed by the Vedette and executed on their testimony!"

"Even as your father and grandfather were executed before you?" Brooke asked acidly. "I should think it would be a warning to you. Or is anarchy ingrained in the Cabot blood?"

HE elevator sighed to a stop on the first floor. Dane's big hand reached out and he kept the girl from opening the door. She looked at him, frightened at the intensity in his eyes. Brooke Loring had seen pictures of Mortimer Cabot, his grandfather, and Samuel Cabot, his father, and the fanatical zeal of their features was Dane's now. At twenty-eight, Dane Cabot looked like his grandfather before him a tall man, not a heavy one, with rather thin cheeks and touseled black hair. There was something very young in his face, something idealistic; and something very old in his shadowed black eyes. Looking at him, no one would have taken the chemist to be a happy man. Too often he had his hands shoved deep in his pockets, harsh lines drawing at the sides of his full lips, a frown creasing his brow.

Old Mortimer Cabot had been a fighter and a dreamer. Too much of a fighter. He was shot by a firing squad for organizing a revolution against the first Hundred back in 1956. Samuel Cabot was equally the dreamer and fighter. He lived to a ripe sixty years before he was exiled to an atmosphere-less planetoid to gasp out his life on a salt crag.

And now Dane, with the heritage of rebel Cabots in his blood, was inevitably drifting down the same tragic trail they had blazed. It was not a secret that he was on the "To Be Watched" list of the Vedette, the secret police. If Mortimer and Samuel had not both broken the law by secretly marrying the girls of their choice and having normal children by them, Dane might have been a quiescent, studious worker under The Hundred.

It was Dane's complaint that a glass jar could not bestow much character on its offspring. For in him throbbed the love of freedom, rendered hotter by bitterness that stemmed from the things he saw every day of his life. And that bitterness was a galling flood in his heart at this moment.

His hands went down to grip Brooke by the shoulders.

"Let's stop kidding ourselves, Brooke," he said earnestly. "You know why I said I was ready to quit. I heard the news this morning. What I want to know is—are you going to go through with it?"

The girl's brown eyes fell, and she pushed back a curl that had strayed from the carefully upswept coiffure.

"I don't understand you, Dane. What—"

Deep hurt made Dane's eyes smoky.

"You understand me well enough! I want your answer right now? Are you or aren't you going to marry East Bayard?"

"It's for The Hundred to say not me."

"You'd marry that arrogant snob?"

"Why not?" she flared. "What woman wouldn't be proud to be the wife of the future head of The Hundred? East Bayard is fine and strong, as well as a genius. He'll fill his father's posi-