At last Jay Kalam lowered the instrument.

  “It is unfortunate that no visiwave equipment has yet been installed on Phobos,” he said. “I am communicating direct, by ultrawave. But Mars is now more than a hundred million miles away. It will take nine minutes for the message to reach the

  keeper. In ten, the star Ulnar XIV should have ceased to exist in the material universe—although terrestrial astronomers will naturally not be able to detect its disappearance for another eighty years!”

  He paced a nervous turn across the end of the big silent room, beyond the desk.

  “Twenty minutes,” he muttered. “Before we can get any reply—”

  “What was that?”

  Hal Samdu was suddenly peering about the empty room, blaster level in his big

  gnarled hand. “Didn’t you hear it, Jay?” he demanded. “A muffled purr! Or feel a breath of bitter cold?”

  “I heard nothing, Hal.” Jay Kalam sighed, wearily. “We’ve been under too much strain. I’ll order you something to drink. And look through the report, while we’re waiting.”

  He broke the seal on the big green envelope. “Eh!” His jaw fell slack. “This is no report.” “But it is, Jay! It hasn’t been out of my sight.” Out upon the desk the Commander poured a score of neatly tied packets of little

  yellow slips.

  “These are I O U’s!” he gasped. “Payable to the New Moon Syndicate. They must have come from the vaults of Caspar Hannas! And here—here—” His trembling fingers had found a familiar sheet of stiff crimson parchment. It bore

  the serpentine monogram. Upon it, hi that precise familiar script, was written: My dear Commander: Admiral-General Samdu’s brilliant summary has given you a sufficient idea of the

  genuinely brilliant work of his investi-gators, and I believe that circumstances will very shortly prove the document to be no longer of value to you.

  The Basilisk “Derron!” Waving the blaster, Hal Samdu was peering wildly about the great armored room. “We can’t escape bun—not even here! If Giles doesn’t get him—”

  Jay Kalam was still staring at the red sheet, with dull lifeless eyes, when: Krrr! Krrr! Krrr! shrilled the tiny, piercing emergency call from his communicator.

  With stiff fingers he groped again for the little black disk, set the dial, and held it to his ear. Hal Samdu, watching, saw his face grow taut and white. The instrument at last

  dropped out of his fingers, and he swayed over the desk, holding himself up with trembling arms.

  “It wasn’t the reply,” Hal Samdu was rasping hoarsely. “There hasn’t been time! What has happened, Jay?”

  The lustreless, glazing eyes of Jay Kalam stared at him.

  “The worst, Hal,” he whispered. “That was a frightened bodyguard calling from Phobos—the call crossed ours. The Basilisk has struck again. This time he has taken them all. John Star. And Bob’s wife and her child. And—”

  He made a little shrug of hopeless defeat.

  “And—the keeper of the peace!”

  The Plundered Vault

  That mighty, feral purr receded. The icy cold was gone. Chan Derron could breathe again. Swaying unsteadily, still on his feet, he tried to see where he was, but a smothering darkness wrapped him. His heart was hammering. His breath was a rapid gasping. Cold goose pimples still roughened his body. He had been snatched from before the menacing weapon of Vanya Eloyan, he knew, by that uncanny agency of the Basilisk—and his very vanishing, the girl would take for absolute proof that he was himself the criminal!

  But now—where was he?

  In some confined black space. His feet scraped on a metal floor, and the swift ring of the sound told him that walls were near. He stumbled forward, and his hands came upon a barrier of cold metal.

  Was this the Euthanasia Clinic—and the thought drove a cold blade of panic into him—where another victim of the Basilisk had been found murdered? Was death waiting for him, in this thick darkness, now? What was that?

  He crouched and spun. Intently he listened, but there was no sound beyond the prompt echo. His eyes strained vainly into the blackness. His hand swept instinctively toward the holster under his cloak. And then he remembered, with a sinking sickness in his heart, that the girl had disarmed him.

  Something brushed his shoulder. He put up a defensive arm, and something tapped it again. He tried to quiet a pounding heart, and groped before him. His cold fingers caught a swinging pendant. He pulled at it, and a blue-white glare of atomic light blinded him.

  For a moment he had to cover his eyes. And then, staring about, he blinked again in wonder. This was indeed a vault—just before him was the ponderous lock-mechanism of an armored door that must have weighed two hundred tons—but in no crematorium.

  For the long shelves that lined the branching narrow corridors were stacked with the heavy bags and rolls and packets that held the symbols of wealth, all neatly sorted into chips and scrip and coin and currency. And every bag and roll and packet bore the yellow crescent that was the New Moon’s emblem. This, the dazed realization

  broke upon Chan, was the New Moon’s treasure vault!

  Then he noticed a curious thing. The scrip of the New Moon Syndicate, the chips used at play, and the bags of coin were all apparently intact—but upon the shelves labeled to contain Green Hall certificates, there were only stacks of rough clay bricks. The vault had been looted! What remained was almost worthless—all the real money was gone, with only mocking clay left in its place!

  And his tall body went suddenly rigid and cold. For the vault would presently be opened—probably it had been locked, for safety, because of the Basilisk’s promised raid. When it was opened, the Le-gion of Space and the New Moon police would find the man they thought they wanted—cornered.

  In the silence of the vault, Chan began to wonder if the man who had put him there still watched him. His strained nerves could feel alert and hostile eyes upon him. Imagination pictured the Basilisk laughing at him—a low thick chuckle, he thought of it, cold, diabolical, inhumanly gloating.

  “Well, Mr. Basilisk?” He couldn’t stop his own wild, ragged voice from talking into the mocking silence. “What am I to do now? Sit down and cry? Tear my nails out scratching at the wall? Hang myself from the shelves? Or just let them find me?”

  It was hard to keep from screaming. He paced up and down the metal floor, driven with a savage, futile energy. Apprehension painted a vague sinister presence, leering from beyond the shelves.

  “Well, can you hear me?” he choked. “How does it feel to be a god, Basilisk? To watch every man in the System? To follow all who try to escape your power, wherever they go? To take what you want? And slay whom you will?”

  He shook his fist, against the bare metal wall.

  “It may feel pretty great—to your twisted brain—whoever you are. But you won’t last forever! For some poor devil will get you— somebody that you’ve mocked and tortured and battered until all that keeps him alive is a little voice that says kill him, kill him, kill him!

  “Somebody, Basilisk, like me.”

  Then it happened that his aimless pacing brought him to the scrap of paper on the floor and it happened that his wildly staring eyes glimpsed the scrawled symbols on it. With a wondering exclamation, he snatched it up, smoothed it with his fingers, studied it anxiously.

  A small oblong sheet, torn across one end. Scratched upon it, in hasty pencil marks, were three heliocentric space-time positions, followed by a series of numbers in which Chan could see neither relation nor meaning.

  The first position designated was that of the New Moon, he recognized—the position it had occupied at the moment of that midnight on which the Basilisk had taken the little gambler, Davian.

  The second position—and the thing that had first caught Chan’s eye—was a point located in the constellation Draco, at a distance of some ten billions of miles from the Sun. That was the location of the unknown object Chan had discovered when he fled

  northward from the Legion fleet, the object to which he had been planning to escape when the pursuit of the Basilisk drove him to turn and fight.

  The third position was also in the Dragon—but at a heliocentric elevation which Chan quickly interpreted into the amazing distance of eighty light-years.

  After a few moments of study, Chan Derron slipped the crumpled scrap very hastily into the pocket of his tunic, and fervently hoped that the Basilisk wasn’t looking— after all, he told himself, a presumably human brain must be limited in its power of attention.

  The millions of tons of that object in space had been an utter mystery. This bit of paper seemed good evidence that it was connected with the operations of the Basilisk. And the discovery opened the faintest possible chance—

  His fists were clenched.

  “If I can get out,” he muttered, “out of here and out of the New Moon and back to the Phantom Atom—if she’s still safe where I left her—if I can get aboard her, and escape the Legion fleet, and get out to that object—”

  His voice fell to a soundless whisper.

  “If I can do all that, Mr. Basilisk—look out!”

  Great shoulders square again, he strode to the lock. Its bolts and levers were uncovered for him to see—bright metal bars weighing many tons. But they were yet secure. His desperate strength and frantic eyes could discover no way to move them.

  “If Giles Habibula were here—” he muttered.

  Wistfully he recalled the fabulous exploits of the old Legionnaire in picking the locks of the Medusae and opening the guarded vaults of the Cometeers. Habibula, doubtless, with all this mechanism open before him, could have opened the door at once.

  But Chan Derron was completely baffled.

  He was standing back, panting, sweat-drenched from useless effort —when something clicked, concealed motors hummed, and the great bolts began to slide slowly back as if of their own accord.

  It would be the men of Caspar Hannas, of course, opening the vault. Chan Derron’s hand flashed automatically to his armpit, to find only the empty holster of his blaster and the straps that still held the compact unit of the geopellor to his body.

  Weaponless, he could only wait, watching the appallingly deliberate well-oiled movement of the bolts. In the geopellor, ironically, lay power to carry him across a hundred million miles of space, but it was useless now. At last the bolts were withdrawn, and the ponderous disk of the door swung slowly open.

  “Hasten, you fools!” a great harsh voice was booming. “I must see if all is safe.” That must be Caspar Hannas himself, driven wild with a well-founded fear for his treasure. “If the Basilisk can do all the things he has done, these locks are worthless.”

  “And there he is!” It was a triumphant shout, from a half-glimpsed man in the yellow of the New Moon’s police. “Trapped!”

  The violet, blinding tongue of a proton jet whipped through the widening opening. And the voice of Caspar Hannas bellowed:

  “Forward, men! We’ve got him! He’s worth half a million— remember—dead or alive! And the woman—if she’s with him—half a million more!”

  Chan Derron had stepped swiftly aside, at the first flash of the ray. He waited, listening. There must be a score of men without, he knew from the little sounds of feet and breath and weapons, and they were alertly advancing. He snatched the swinging cord and snapped off the lights in the vault.

  “Come out, Basilisk!” boomed the tremendous voice of Caspar Hannas. “With empty hands! Or we’ll come in and get you!”

  Crouching in the darkness, Chan called a desperate last appeal:

  “I’m not the Basilisk, Hannas.” His voice stuck and quivered. “I’m Chan Derron. More a victim than anyone. If you’ll listen to me, Hannas—”

  “Forward, men!” thundered Hannas. “He admits he’s Derron, and we’ve caught him in the vault! Burn him up!”

  The door was swinging wider. Out of the darkness, Chan watched the men creeping forward. Narrowed eyes fearfully searching, proton guns uneasily ready.

  He gulped and tried to still the shuddering dread in him.

  “You are afraid of me,” he called. “Every one of you. I can see the sweat of fear on all your faces. I can see fear crawling in your eyes. Well, you had better be afraid. But it is the Basilisk you ought to fear, and not the man his monstrous tricks have loaded down with suspicion. I, too, am hunting the Basilisk. And now I have some information. I can help you—”

  The great voice of Hannas cut him off:

  “You’ve got too much information, Derron! But it is going to die with you. Get him, men!”

  And the men in yellow slipped forward again.

  Chan Derron caught his breath, and snatched one of the mocking clay bricks off the racks. And his fingers gripped the little black control spindle of the geopellor, at the end of the cable that ran down his sleeve.

  “If you can!” he shouted. “But you won’t get your treasure, Mr. Hannas! Your vault is stripped clean. Here’s what the Basilisk left!”

  He flung the little brick, so that it shattered against the face of the door. Fragments pelted the men beyond. Half a dozen blinding jets leapt, as nervous ringers contracted. One man, sobbing an oath of fear, dropped his weapon and ran—until an officer’s swift beam cut him down.

  “Empty?” came the stricken voice of Hannas. “Empty—”

  This was the moment. Chan filled his lungs with breath—for the speed of the geopellor made breathing almost impossible. He squeezed and twisted the control handle. And the compact little unit on his shoulders lifted him. It flung him toward the wall of guns.

  Bright proton guns flung up to stop him, but their deadly violet lances stabbed behind him. He was already driving bullet-like down one of the long corridors beneath the gaming halls.

  “After him, you cowards—”

  The great roaring voice of Caspar Hannas was whisked away, upon the shrieking wind. But the rays could overtake him. Thin lines of fire cut straight to the armored wall ahead. One hissed very near, and ionized air brought Chan a stunning shock.

  Teeth gritted, fighting the darkness in his reeling brain, he twisted the little spindle back and forth. The geopellor flung him from side to side, in a swift zigzag, with a savage straining force.

  Greater danger awaited him at the long hall’s end. Once he stopped to seek an exit, he would make a fair target for the men behind—and the first bull’s-eye worth half a million dollars.

  He bent his twisting flight toward the floor, and blinked his streaming, wind-blinded eyes. And he saw a small door swing open ahead. A huge man hi white rilled it completely, carrying a bag of potatoes.

  Chan checked his velocity a little—but perilously little—and aimed his bullet flight for the fat cook’s burden. He saw the man’s eyes begin to stare and widen, and he set his own body for the impact.

  The geodesic field shielded him somewhat, but it was still a dazing blow. The cook was hurled flat in the doorway. And Chan, beyond him, came into a kitchen bigger than he had ever dreamed of. Acres of stoves; endless white conveyor tables loaded with dishes and food. All but deserted, now, for the New Moon was being emptied, by fear of the Basilisk.

  Beyond the kitchen, in the narrow quarters of the servants, he realized that he had lost his direction. Behind him was a tumult of fear and menace. Half those who glimpsed his flight screamed and fled or hid. But another half, made daring by the magic promise of that half-million, shouted to the pursuers behind, or snatched at weapons of their own.

  But the geopellor was swifter than all the hue and cry. Chan dropped upon his feet, walked breathless around the turn of a corridor, and met a yellow-capped porter hastening with a bag.

  “Which way,” he gasped, “to the docks?”

  “That way, sir.” The man pointed. “To your left, beyond the pools. But I’m afraid, sir, you’ll find the ships all booked—”

  His mouth fell open as Chan lifted into the air and soared over his head.

  “The Basilisk!” he began to scream. “This way! To the docks!”

  The pursuit followed his voice. But Chan’s plunging flight had already carried him into the “hanging pools” that were one of the New Moon’s novel attractions—great spheres of water, each held aloft by a gravity-plate core of its own, each illuminated with colored light that turned it to a globe of changing fire.

  The swimmers had fled. Chan threaded a swift way among the spheres. He heard an alarm siren moaning behind him. And suddenly the gravity-circuits must have been cut off, for the shimmering spheres of water turned to plunging falls.

  Already, however, the geopellor had flung him over the rail of a high balcony. He burst through a door beyond, and came into the vast space at the docks. The immense floor was crowded, now, with gay-clad thousands, swept into panic by fear of the Basilisk, fighting for a place on the out-bound ships.

  Leaning for a moment against the balcony door, Chan caught his breath. He must have a space suit. There were space suits in the locker rooms beyond this frightened crowd, beside the great valve where he had entered the New Moon. He could fly across the mob, he thought, in seconds and with little risk. But sight of him flying would surely turn fear to stark panic. Many would doubtless be trampled and maimed.

  After a second, he went down the steps on foot, and pressed into the fighting throng. That was the longer way. It meant the danger that the valve-crew would be warned against him. Yet he could not take the other way.

  It took him endless minutes to push through fringes of the crowd. He heard the distant sob of sirens, and the thunder of annunciators beating against the voice of the mob. He knew the hunt was spreading, and was uneasily aware of his head towering above all those about him.

  But he came at last to the little door marked Employees Only, and slipped through it into the locker rooms. Here was less confusion than he found anywhere—the workers in the great sign were used to danger. He hurried to the locker where he had left his armor, stripped off his borrowed clothing, flung himself into the space suit, and strode toward the great air lock.

 

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