His arrogance was his downfall.

Or perhaps it wrongs him to call it "arrogance." Perhaps "confidence" would be a better word, for he had a certain talent he knew none could equal, and the challenge was irresistible to a man of his nature. And so it should have been, given how carefully it had been crafted to that end…

Sweat trickled down Giles Habibula's broad face in the steamy, moonless dark. The eerie cries of a night such as Earth had never known came from the jungles, where huge armored sauroids splashed and grunted as they fought one another for life—and food—while the strange scaled “birds” of Venus waited to pick the losers' bones. But those were familiar sounds, and they came from the far side of the compound wall, and Habibula paid them no heed. He'd hidden in the shrubbery against the wall since the chalet staff ushered the last public visitor away, and now he waited patiently for the staff to leave, as well.

He must be mad to attempt an escapade such as this when the mortal Gambling Commission had already offered its reward for his poor, underappreciated self, he thought with a smile, but the curse of Giles Habibula's life was ever the same. There was never time enough for all the splendid food, the fine wines, the beautiful women, the challenges to his wit and skill, and when three of the four combined in a single temptation, it was more than mortal man could do to turn his back upon it. Especially when the lass who'd set him onto it was such a fine, beautiful one. Ah, the fire in those blue eyes, and that lovely head of midnight hair! And the spirit of her, too. The Solar System might see her like once in a lifetime, he told himself, and as well for the rest of us, for we'd never survive two of her!

He smothered a chuckle and checked the time once more. Just past twenty-two hundred. He'd spent two days timing the staff's schedule, and he nodded in satisfaction as he stole silently out of the imported Earth shrubbery about the chalet's protective wall.

The grounds were well lit, but the chalet's owners relied on automatic systems, nothing so fallible as humans, so there were no roving patrols, and he'd plotted his course with care. He crept across flower beds and grass like a great, prowling cat, avoiding the cameras and illuminating spotlights as he flowed through puddles of inky shadow. He paused just beyond the chalet itself, scanning for infrared beams, and chuckled once more as he found them. Ah, the wit of the lad who'd planned the security here! It was a mortal fine job he'd done, but not the equal to Giles Habibula!

He sidled to the side, studying the interlinking play of the beams, and for all his massive bulk, he moved quiet as the breeze. Fat other men might think him, and so, indeed, he was, but there was muscle under that fat, and he carried himself with a dancer's grace, placing each foot with feline caution. And even as he surveyed the challenge, his mind went back to the beautiful young woman awaiting him in the Venusberg bar.

"It won't be easy, Mr. Harnat," the woman called Ethyra Coran warned, and Giles Habibula  —Grenz Harnat, to her—nodded gravely. "On the other hand," she went on, "my client will pay a half million dollars for the Dragon's Eye, and they may have been just a bit too clever in the way they planned the security."

"Ah, and have they now?" The remnants of a stupendous meal lay in ruins before him, and he sipped more wine —a splendid Martian Burgundy— as he listened to her. A half million was a paltry value to set on the famed Dragon's Eye, yet it seemed reasonable enough under the circumstances. The flawless Martian ruby was priceless, but it was also half the size of a man’s head, and the very size which made it so rare and beautiful would make it impossible to fence on the open market. 

"Your client's not thinking to have it cut, is he?" Habibula asked after a moment. Ethyra raised an eyebrow in perplexity, and he shrugged. "I'll have no part of it if he is,” he explained. “A mortal crime against nature it would be to break up a lovely bauble such as that.”

"A burglar with esthetics?" She laughed in sheer delight at the thought, then sobered. "No, Mr. Harnat. My client intends to retain it for, ah, his private collection."

"Does he now?" Habibula nodded in approval, opened another bottle of wine, and concentrated on his glass as he poured. "And how might it be they've been 'a bit too clever,' lass?" he asked.

"They're relying as much on misdirection as on security," she replied. "No one on Venus is supposed to know the gem is here, so they've stayed away from banks and regular vaults. Instead, they've lodged it with Samuel Ulnar, and he's hidden it in his chalet."

"The Ulnar Chalet?" Habibula looked up from his glass so abruptly he spilled wine, and his gray eyes brightened. "In his cellars, is it?"

"Why, yes." Ethyra sounded surprised, and he smiled happily. He'd heard of those cellars. "Samuel Ulnar is on Earth, so the chalet is officially unoccupied," she added. "The Dragon's Eye's owners expect that to help divert attention from their own presence, and they were told the Ulnar cellars are one of the most secure places on Venus."

"And so they should be, lass. So they should be," Habibula murmured. The Ulnar cellars, he thought, under the very chalet Zane Delmar, Samuel Ulnar's ancestor, had built seven centuries ago. Its historical significance made it a major tourist attraction, and the Venusian branch of the once all-powerful Ulnar family allowed public tours of its spacious, landscaped grounds. But its interior was private, for it was still home to Samuel Ulnar and his wife... and to the finest collection of wines and brandies in the Solar System. A single bottle of European champagne from that cellar would fetch five thousand dollars, but what a mortal shame to waste such a vintage on any but the most cultured palate! His eyes gleamed at the thought of what he might find as a byproduct of fetching out the Dragon's Eye, and he beamed at the young woman.

"Just you be telling me all you know of this blessed security,” he said.

"I still wish we could have avoided giving him an accurate map, Sir," the younger man fretted. "Couldn't we have had her—?"

"If he noticed any discrepancies, he'd pull out in a second," the older man said patiently. "Besides, this is supposed to be a test, as well, and how good a test would it be if we deliberately fed him false information?"

Habibula crouched outside the wine cellar door and examined the lock with the aid of a small hand light. Well, now! Isn't that a mortal surprise!

He bent closer and ran his fingers over the three combination wheels, and his eyebrows rose in respect. He'd always heard the Ulnar Chalet had first-class security, and any member of the Ulnar clan could afford the very best, but this was more than he'd expected. It was a Cerberus Twelve, possibly the most complex and effective lock yet designed by man, but he smiled, then gave it a fond pat. A good lock was like a trusted friend to Giles Habibula, for he had a certain way with them, and this one was based on a design his own father had created fifty years before. A mortal pity the old man had been a finer locksmith than a businessman, for his creation had been stolen by sharper, craftier minds, but he'd taught his son its secrets before they had.

Giles smiled again, and his short, strong fingers began to turn the knobs with a delicate precision any surgeon might have envied.

"Sir, I'm sorry, but I really don't think he's coming. Or not tonight, at least." The young man rose and walked about the room for a moment, stretching muscles cramped by hours of motionless waiting. "It's after two hundred. If he was coming, he'd certainly have started by now."

"How do you know he hasn't?" the older man countered/1The youngster looked at him in disbelief for a moment from those wide blue eyes, straightened the fit of his green uniform tunic, then waved at the console before them.

"If he were here, we'd know about it, Sir," he said positively.

"Ah, you young people!" The older man smiled. "So much faith in technology and so little in human inventiveness! Sit down, John. And remember, he's Giles Habibula."

"Good morning, Mr. Habibula. My name is Jartha. Colonel James Jartha of the Legion, at your service." The bearded man in the green uniform bowed courteously, apparently oblivious to the three enormous legionnaires who had "escorted" Habibula into the chalet's security center, then waved as a beautiful young woman walked in through another door. "I believe you've met Miss Coran," he added.

"Aye, and so I have," Habibula replied. His gray eyes were hard for just an instant, but then he smiled at the young woman and nodded to the knapsack one of the legionnaires held. "I'll take my mortal money in small bills, lass," he said genially, "but I'm afraid you'll have to get the Dragon's Eye from that great, fearsome brute with my knapsack if you're still minded to have it."

The young woman smiled, then shook her head with a trace of sadness, and Colonel Jartha cleared his throat.

"I trust you won't hold this against Miss Coran, Mr. Habibula. She was only doing her job."

"Her job, is it?" Habibula inquired pleasantly.

"Indeed. In fact, she had no choice. Miss Coran's father owns a bar—the Blue Unicorn, I believe it's called—in the Aphrodite Sea just off the coast of New Chicago. Unfortunately, there were a few, ah, irregularities in his departure from the Legion some twenty years ago." Jartha shook his head sadly. "A pity, but you know how military organizations can be."

"So you used mortal blackmail to get the lass to do your bidding, did you?" Habibula observed shrewdly.

"We prefer to think of it as encouraging her to volunteer," the colonel disagreed. "Of course, the Green Hall itself has authorized her father's pardon in return for her services."

"Has it now? And why would the Green Hall be interested in trapping a poor, honest nobody like myself?"

"You wrong yourself, Mr. Habibula." Jartha smiled. "You're quite well known in certain circles. Indeed, when we asked who the most skilled, ah, lock expert in the System might be, our contacts assured us it was either you or Stephen Matha."

"Matha! That fearsome nincompoop?!" Habibula glared at the Legion colonel. "Why, I've more talent in one hand—no, in one mortal finger!—than that great, clumsy, bumbling, overconfident—"

"Perhaps not, but I do need you, and I'm afraid that this"—he dug back into the knapsack and extracted the huge ruby—"is the real Dragon's Eye. We've caught you red-handed in its theft, Mr. Habibula. I'd say you're looking at ten to twenty years in the uranium mines of Pluto."

"But it was you yourself set me on to steal the lovely, wicked thing," Habibula pointed out shrewdly, "and that makes you an accomplice!"

"No, Mr. Habibula. It makes Miss Coran an accomplice. I'm not even here."

"You're not—?!" Habibula glared at the colonel for a moment, then darted a look at Ethyra Coran, and the beautiful, sable-haired young woman had gone quite pale. He clenched his jaws until his teeth hurt, then turned his baleful gray eyes back to Jartha. "You've gone to a mortal lot of trouble just to trap poor Giles—aye, and this lass, too, it seems. So what might it be you're wanting of us, Colonel James Jartha?"

"Miss Coran's part is done, assuming you accept my terms, Mr. Habibula."

"And what might those terms be?" 

"The Legion of Space is the Green Hall's first line of defense," Jartha replied in a voice that was suddenly deadly serious, "but its final defense is the device known as AKKA. Have you heard of it?"

"Aye, of course I have. Everyone in the mortal System's heard of it!"

"Then you know that there can never be more than a single keeper of the weapon, only one individual who knows the secret of its construction and operation?" Habibula nodded, and Jartha went on heavily. "Unfortunately, that isn't quite the truth of it, Mr. Habibula. Only one person may ever know the secret at one time, yet we can never be certain that no accident or disease will overtake the present Keeper before he or she can pass it on to his or her successor. And so the secret is written down, locked inside a box of adamanite which can be opened only with the fingerprints of the designated successor. Not even you could open that box's lock without them, and any attempt to force it would only destroy its contents."

Seventeen months later, Colonel James Jartha, commander of the Legion of Space's Office of Intelligence, opened the door of his office at the very heart of the Legion's huge headquarters building and stopped dead on the threshold.

His last secret report from Giles Habibula was over six months old, and the colonel had come to the unhappy conclusion that not even Habibula had proved capable of breaking the defenses of the Green Hall's enemies. Jartha had come to like the fat, cunning rogue in the year they'd worked together, and he'd felt a gnawing guilt for entrapping the man and sending him to his death, yet as he'd told Habibula that night in the cellars of Ulnar Chalet, he'd had no choice. He hadn't entirely abandoned all hope, but it was growing harder to cling to it, and he'd taken to avoiding responses to Ethyra Coran. The young woman had plagued his office with carefully, innocently worded inquiries about Habibula almost weekly. Her queries had grown almost desperate of late as the silence stretched out, yet Jartha had no heart to confirm Habibula's death to her when any tiny trace of hope remained.

But now he stood just inside his office door, staring at the small, silvery box in the middle of his desk top. It bore no insignia, no marking of any sort except two small, darker ovals —about the size of fingertips—on its top, yet he knew instantly what it was.

He crossed the office slowly and sank into his chair, staring at the box and fearing to touch it, and his mind raced. It was impossible for anyone to break the security on Legion HQ and penetrate to his office. No one could do that…except, perhaps, for one man with a certain talent.

He began to smile, and then to chuckle, and reached out to the box at last. He took it in his hand and tossed it lightly on his palm, and even through his heady relief, it seemed impossible that so small and light a thing could hold the secret of so much destruction. They'd have to improve security on it in the future, he thought, and made a mental note to discuss ways to do just that with Legionnaire Habibula.

He paused, then, and his head cocked. Speaking of Habibula...?

He set the box carefully inside the safe built into his desk and spun the combination. It should be safe enough there—from anyone except Habibula, of course—until he could have it conveyed back to the Green Hall under maximum security, and with it tucked away, he could concentrate on other questions. Like the whereabouts of the man who'd stolen it back from the Solar System's enemies and flowed through Legion HQ's security like so much smoke to deposit it on his desk. Now, if he were Habibula, where would he—?

His intercom buzzed sharply, and he pressed the button. "Yes?"