will appear----"

A new voice, bland and unctuous, spoke in the control cabin from behind
the three men.

"_Not necessarily, my honored friend Carse_," it said. "_You will
observe there is no need for a ship to appear._"

Ku Sui had come.

CHAPTER III

_The Wave of a Handkerchief_

He stood smiling in the door-frame leading aft to the rear entrance
port. There was all grace in his posture, in the easy angle at which one
arm rested against the side bulkhead, in the casual way in which he held
the ray-gun that bored straight at Carse. Height and strength he had,
and a perfectly proportioned figure. Beauty, too, of face, with skin of
clearest saffron, soft, sensitive mouth and ascetic cheeks. His hair was
fine and black, and swept straightly back from the high narrow forehead
where lived his tremendous intelligence.

It was his eyes that gave him away, his eyes of rare green that from a
distance looked black. Slanting, veiled, unreadable beneath the lowered
silky lashes, there was the soul of a tiger in their sinister depths. It
was his eyes that his victims remembered....

"So you have arrived, Dr. Ku," whispered Hawk Carse, and for a second he
too smiled, with eyes as bleak and hard as frosty chilled steel. Their
glances met and held--the cold, hard, honest rapier; the subtle perfumed
poison. The other men in the cabin were forgotten; the feeling was
between these two. Strikingly contrasted they stood there: Carse, in
rough blue denim trousers, faded work-shirt, open at the neck,
old-fashioned rubber shoes and battered skipper's cap askew on his
flaxen hair; Ku Sui, suavely impeccable in high-collared green silk
blouse, full-length trousers of the same material, and red slippers, to
match the wide sash which revealed the slender lines of his waist. A
perfume hung about the man, the indescribable odor of tsin-tsin flowers
from the humid jungles of Venus.

"You see I meet you halfway, my friend," the Eurasian said with delicate
mock courtesy. "A surpassing pleasure I have anticipated for a long
time. _No, no!_ I see that already I shall have to ask you a small
favor. A thousand pardons: it's my deplorable ability to read your mind
that requires me to ask it. Your so justly famed speed on the draw might
possibly overcome this advantage"--he raised his ray-gun slightly--"and,
though I know you would not kill me--save in the direst emergency, since
you wish to take me a living prisoner--I would find it most