Chan Derron shook his head, protestingly.

  “But I’m not the Basilisk,” his voice broke hoarsely. “I’m just his victim. He has planted a hundred bits of evidence, to pin suspicion on me. Look at this money taken from the vaults of Hannas.”

  Giles Habibula nodded, and his yellow face broke into a happy smile.

  “Ah, so lad!” he wheezed. “Look at it—millions and millions of dollars. Enough to keep a man in wine and women and luxury for a whole lifetime. Or two men, when the life of one is already run to the end. Shall we take off with our loot? Ah, it will be like the old days, lad—living in flight from the Legion?”

  The eyes of Chan Derron narrowed to an accusing stare.

  “You admit you were an outlaw hi the old days,” he muttered. “You’re famous for your way with locks. And you have learned all the scientific tricks of the Medusae and the Cometeers. I believe you are the Basilisk, Giles Habibula.”

  “Life, no lad!” The old man turned pale. “Don’t think that—”

  “If you aren’t,” rapped Chan Derron, “tell me one thing: how did you find the Phantom Atom, when all the Legion failed?”

  “Easy, lad,” wheezed Giles Habibula. “Among the keys I lifted from Dr. Charles Derrel in the Diamond Room, was one stamped: Controlhouse 17-B-285. One question told me that the mirror that motor turns was out of order. That’s how I knew where to meet you. But surely, lad, you don’t think—”

  Soberly, Chan Derron shook his head.

  “I believe you’re hunting the Basilisk,” he said. “So am I. And I’ve a clue—which is more than I believe the Legion has—besides those the Basilisk has planted to pin his crimes on me. You may come with me, if you like.”

  The small leaden eyes bunked at him, blankly.

  “I told you, lad, that I came to seek the Basilisk,” Habibula wheezed at last. “If you are not the monster—and if you can take me to him—then I’ll go with you.”

  Chan gestured briefly toward the compact living apartments aft.

  “Make yourself at home,” he said. “I am going forward. We have got to slip out of the sign, and elude the fleet, and get to an object I have discovered near Thuban, in Draco. We’ve cathode plates enough to reach it, but not to return. I shall expect you to stand a watch, later.”

  “Ah, so, lad. You can depend on Giles Habibula.”

  Chan Derron went up into the pilot bay, and Giles Habibula waddled back into the galley. There, preparing an extravagant meal out of the slender stock of supplies he found, he made an immense deliberate clatter of pots and pans.

  Presently his deft pudgy fingers tuned the visiwave relay hidden under his cloak. Keeping up the noise to cover his voice, he put the communicator disk to his lips and dispatched his first brief message to Commander Kalam:

  “Aboard Derron’s ship. Bound for mysterious object near Thuban in Draco. For life’s sake, follow!”

  He finished getting the meal, tasting copiously from every dish, and carried a loaded tray forward to the pilot bay. Chan Derron was towering in that tiny space, concentrated on instruments and controls. His great hand motioned Giles Habibula impatiently back.

  “What’s the trouble, lad?” the old man demanded.

  “We’ve a race on.” Chan Derron’s intent eyes didn’t look away from the controls. “Samdu’s fleet picked us up. We’d outrun them if we had enough margin of fuel. As it is—I don’t know. But leave me alone.”

  Giles Habibula shrugged philosophically, and carried the tray back to the galley. Deliberately, he demolished its contents, belched and yawned, and looked hopefully about the shelves.

  “A mortal pity,” he sighed, “that the Basilisk didn’t use his fearful magic to pick us up a few bottles of wine. If he’ll let me join him—I know a few good, well-guarded cellars—aye, vintages five centuries old—that his instrument might reach.”

  He pried himself upright again with the cane, labored aft, and tumbled into one of the tiny staterooms. Soon a series of softer sounds rose against the keen hum of the hard-driven geodynes: whistle and flutter and sob and moan, whistle and flutter and sob and moan—the snore of Giles Habibula.

  When the regularity of those new sounds had become well established, another person slipped out of the rearmost of the four tiny cabins. A woman. The quick grace of her tall slim body spoke of unusual strength. Platinum-colored hair framed a face of surpassing loveliness. Alertly watchful, her clear eyes were violet.

  Moving with no sound audible above the hastening song of the geodynes and the snoring of Giles Habibula, she went swiftly forward. One slender hand clung near a singular jewel, like a great white snow-crystal, that hung from her throat. And the other, with the practiced and familiar grip, held a proton blaster of the newest Legion design.

  She came to the little opening in the bulkhead behind the pilot bay, and stood

  watching Chan Derron, with the ready weapon leveled at his heart. His broad back was toward her, his whole big body was tense. He seemed absorbed in his task. His great hands moved deftly over the controls as he fought to drag from power cells and geodynes the last possible quantum of energy.

  For a long time she watched him.

  Once a telltale flashed suddenly. Chan Derron started. His big hands moved convulsively, and the steady musical note of the geodynes rose higher in the scale.

  “In tomorrow’s name!” she heard him mutter. “For one more ton of cathode plates—

  An unwilling little glisten had come into her eyes. Her blond head flung angrily. She caught her breath, and lifted the blaster. He would never even know.

  But the Basilisk ought to know. All his crimes had earned a long, long taste of the bitterness of death. She let the blaster sink again and watched. Telltales and detectors told her that the fleet was in pursuit. Set up on the keyboard of the calculator, she could read the destination of the Phantom Atom—a point in Draco, ten billion miles from the sun. And every taut movement of Chan Derron reminded her that this was a desperate race.

  What was located at the point? And why the haste to reach it? Her pressure on the blaster’s release would destroy all hope of answering those questions. That was the only reason, the girl told herself, that she must wait. But she turned suddenly, and went swiftly and soundlessly back down the corridor, toward the cabin where she had been concealed.

  The whistle and flutter and sob and moan of Giles Habibula’s snoring had never faltered. But, the instant after the girl had passed his cabin door, it ceased abruptly, and a wheezing voice softly advised:

  “Stop, lass, right where you stand.”

  The girl spun very swiftly, the proton gun leaping up in her hands.

  She found Giles Habibula standing out in the corridor. His thick cane was leveled at her body, and her own weapon dropped from the look in his slate-colored eyes.

  “Ah, thank you, lass,” he sighed. “It would be a shameful pity to destroy a thing as lovely as you are. And I beg you not to force my hand. For I know you, lass. Old Giles could never forget the mortal beauty of Luroa.”

  Something swift and cold and deadly flashed in the violet eyes. The blaster jerked again in the girl’s strong hand. But it was met by an instant motion of the cane. Her reply was a smile—so lovely that the old man blinked and gasped.

  “And I know you,” her smooth voice said. “You are Giles Habibula. I don’t think any other man could have caught me as you did.”

  The yellow face beamed at her.

  “Ah, so, I am Giles Habibula. Aye, and forty years ago you would have heard my name—or a dozen of my names—in the underworlds of every planet. For Giles Habibula, in the old days, was as great an operator—as bold and clever and

  successful—as you have been in yours, Luroa.”

  The girl still smiled her dazzling and inscrutable smile.

  “But now it seems that the two of us,” wheezed Giles Habibula, “are after another outlaw as great as we have been—greater, aye, unless we prove otherwise by catching him.”

  His flat leaden eyes blinked at her.

  “Shall we join forces, lass?” he asked. “Until we have destroyed the Basilisk.” His round yellow head jerked aft, toward Chan Der-ron in the pilot bay. “With my own precious genius,” he said, “and with the deadly cunning and the fearful strength and the mortal beauty that Eldo Arrynu gave to you—ah, no lass, with all of them we cannot fail.”

  He peered at her, anxiously.

  “If you will join me, lass—man and android, against the Basilisk!”

  For an instant the girl’s white loveliness had seemed frozen, so that the wonder of her smile seemed a hollow, painted thing. But then her face abruptly softened. She slipped the blaster into a holster that her furs concealed, and held out a strong slender hand to Giles Habibula.

  “I’m with you, Giles,” she said, “until the Basilisk is dead.” And the old Legionnaire wondered at a difference in her voice. Somehow it seemed naive, bewildered, troubled—somehow like a child’s. “Come, Giles,” she said, and beckoned toward the cabin where she had hidden. “There’s something I must tell you.”

  15 The Dreadful Rock

  The rock, black and naked, broke a lonely sea. The sea had a muddy, green-black color, cut with long strips of floating yellow-red weed. Its surface had an oily, glistening smoothness. The sky above it was a smoky, greenish blue. And the luminary that rose very slowly in it, baking the rock under merciless rays, seemed larger than the sun. It presented an enormous crimson disk, pocked with spots of darkness. The infra-red predominated in its radiation, so that its dull light brought a sweltering heat.

  Upon the summit of the rock, an uneven granite bench not fifty yards in length, were crowded one hundred men and women. Their bodies were slowly cooking under the unendurable rays of that slowly rising sun. They were parched with thirst, for the ocean about them was an undrinkable brine. And they all were coughing, strangling, weeping, gasping with respiratory distress, for the green in the air was free chlorine.

  They were the hundred the Basilisk had taken.

  The last arrival, Jay Kalam, remembered hearing a sudden, queerly penetrating purr, as he stood in his chamber aboard the Inflexible. A resistless force dragged him into a frightful chasm of airless cold. But even before the breath could go out of him, light came back—the dull sinister radiation of this dying star. The feral purr receded, and he found himself sprawling on this barren rock.

  Chlorine burned his lungs. A savage gravitation dragged at his body. Heat struck him

  with a driving, blistering force. And he was sick with an utter hopelessness of despair.

  “Commander Kalam!” choked a voice. “You?”

  It was Lars Eccard, the abducted chairman of the Green Hall Council, red-eyed and gasping, who aided him to his feet. He peered with smarting eyes about the bare summit of the rock, and saw many that he knew—even bent as they were with continual coughing and masked inadequately against the toxic gas with scraps of dampened rags tied over their nostrils.

  He saw Bob Star and a few other Legionnaires who had been taken, standing guard with their blasters on the highest points of the rock. And beyond them, wheeling and soaring and diving in the poison yellow-green haze that hung upon the poison sea, he glimpsed a dozen living originals of the monstrous robot that had appeared in the Diamond Room of the New Moon.

  “They have attacked many times, Commander,” rasped Lars Eccard, beside him. “Thus far we have always beaten them off, but all the weapons are nearly dead.”

  “I have my own blaster.”

  Jay Kalam touched his weapon, but the lean old statesman shook his head.

  “It will help, Commander.” He paused to cough and sob for breath. “But not for long. For the tide is rising. Already, since dawn, it has come up a hundred feet. Another hundred will cover the rock. And there are things in the water more deadly than those in the sky.”

  Jay Kalam climbed a little higher on the rock, with Lars Eccard stumbling behind him. All the haggard, white-masked faces he saw were familiar to him, for these were the hundred foremost citizens of the System.

  A woman lay on a little shelf of stone. Improvised bandages covered her arms and shoulders. A small golden-haired girl knelt beside her, sobbing. Her bandaged hand patted the child’s head.

  “That is Robert Star’s wife,” said Lars Eccard. “One of the winged monsters snatched her up. She was almost beyond the cliffs, before Bob killed it. It dropped her, and fell into the sea. The things that dragged it under the water were terrible indeed.”

  A fit of coughing seized Jay Kalam. It left him breathless, trembling, blinded. His lungs were on fire. Lars Eccard tore a scrap off his tunic, and gave it to him.

  “Wet this, Commander,” he said. “Tie it around your face. Water absorbs chlorine.”

  On a higher ledge, they came upon a dozen men and women kneeling in a circle. All wore the rude masks, and one or another of them was always coughing. But they seemed to ignore the flesh-corroding death they breathed, and the black-winged death that wheeled and screamed above them, the crimson death of heat that beat down from the immense and lazy sun, and the manifold and hidden death beneath the acid, monster-infested sea that rose inexorably about the rock. Each had before him a little heap of pebbles, and their red half-blinded eyes were upon a pair of dancing dice.

  Lars Eccard looked down at them and shrugged.

  “If it helps them to forget—”

  Caspar Hannas was the banker at that game. His broad face, beneath its yellow-stained mask, showed a slow and senseless smile. And the same eagerness moved his great white hands to draw in the pebbles he won, as if they had been diamond chips on the tables of his own New Moon.

  John Comaine, the big blond engineer, did not play. He squatted across from Hannas. His long square face had a wooden impassive look, and his glassy protruding eyes were fixed upon his old employer with what seemed a well-suppressed hostility. Beside him was the queer, box-like instrument he had set up on the New Moon to detect the mysterious agency of the Basilisk.

  Amo Brelekko was rolling the dice. A white handkerchief covered half his face, but otherwise he seemed unchanged since the Diamond Room. His gaudy garments looked immaculate. The rays of the low red sun splintered from his jewels. His thin yellow hands manipulated the cubes with a deft and incredible skill.

  For all that old skill, however, he rolled and lost. The winner, whose thin nervous hands snatched eagerly for the pebbles, was a little gray wisp of a man whose stooped and tattered figure seemed vaguely familiar. He set the play down in a little black book, and then tapped swiftly at the keys of a compact, silent little calculating machine. And suddenly Jay Kalam knew him. He was Abel Davian, the little gambler the Basilisk had taken from the New Moon’s Diamond Room.

  The yellow-stamped money bag, that must still hold the twenty million dollars of his fatal winnings, lay disregarded on the rock be-side him. But he pushed out a handful of black pebbles, and took the dice from Brelekko. Perspiration rolled from his shrunken skin, as he shook the cubes, and threw. He lost, and bent again with a worried frown to his calculator.

  “Strange animals, men,” muttered Lars Eccard.

  Beyond in a shallow rocky cup that John Star guarded, they discovered his wife, Aladoree. She was kneeling, her proud slight body shaken ever and again with paroxysms of dreadful coughing. Her quick hands were busy with some odd little instrument on the ledge before her, improvised from stray bits of wood and metal. She looked up, and saw Jay Kalam. A weary little greeting smiled above her mask, but he saw the death of a hope in her eyes.

  “We had expected to see you, Jay,” came John Star’s hoarse voice. “But on the Inflexible.”

  Jay Kalam looked down at the crude simplicity of the half-completed instrument. This harmless-seeming toy, he knew, was the supreme weapon of mankind, capable of sweeping any known target out of existence. He breathed the symbol of its power:

  “AKKA?”

  The coughing woman who was the keeper of it shook her head.

  “The instrument isn’t finished,” she whispered. “The parts for it that I was wearing, disguised as jewels, have been taken from me. We haven’t found materials enough. I need wire for the coil.”

  Jay Kalam fumbled for the small black disk of his ultrawave communicator. “Perhaps the parts of this will help.”

  “Perhaps.” The haggard woman took it from him. “But even if the instrument is completed, I don’t see how it can serve us. For the Basilisk’s identity, and the seat of his strange power, are still unknown. We don’t even know where we are.”

  “But we can guess,” Jay Kalam told her. “We made a fairly conclusive identification of the star from which the Basilisk’s peculiar robot came. From the abundance of free chlorine here, and the appearance of the sun above—it is pretty obviously type K9e— I believe that this is the same star. That means that our own sun ought to be eighty light-years southward. When night comes, so that we can see the constellations and the Milky Way—”

  “When night comes,” John Star broke in huskily, “we won’t be here. The tide floods this rock.”

  “In that case—”

  Jay Kalam choked and coughed. It was a long time before he could catch his strangling breath, and see again. He looked soberly, then, at the tortured man and the wan-faced woman before him. They were waiting, very grave.

  “In that case,” he whispered again, “I see but one thing that we can do. A very desperate thing. But it offers the only hope there is.”

  “Jay—” John Star gulped. “You don’t mean—”

  The grim dark eyes of the Commander met the patient, luminous gray ones of the keeper.

  “If you can complete the instrument,” he told her quietly, “I think you must use it immediately to destroy this sun, this planet, everything in this stellar system. Even ourselves.”

  The woman’s fine head nodded gravely.

  “I’ll do that,” she said. Her quick hands were turning the little disk of the communicator. “And the parts of this,” she told him, “will supply everything I need.”

  “Wait,” croaked John Star. “First—couldn’t we use it to report our position and our plight? There’s still the Legion—”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24