The Commander shook his head.

  “This is just an ultrawave unit,” he said. “With no visiwave relay, it would take eighty years for our call to reach the System, and eighty years for the answer to come back— and there’s no receiver anywhere sensitive enough to pick up the signals. Even the visiwave relay, that filled a whole room on the Inflexible, had a maximum theoretical range of less than half a light-year.

  “No, John. I think our only hope—”

  Km! Km! Krrr!

  The tiny, piercing beat of the emergency signal checked him. It came from the instrument he had handed Aladoree. Wonderingly, she gave it back. What he heard, when he put it to his ear, was the muted and distorted whisper of the Basilisk.

  “My dear Commander,” it said, “I am forced to interfere with your reckless sacrificial scheme. For quick annihilation from the keeper’s weapon is not what I had planned for ninety-nine of you. I prefer to let you live long enough to pay for all the insults and injuries that have been heaped upon me. I want to give you time to realize that the person who suffered so long as the smallest and the most scorned of men is now the greatest—the Basilisk. And when you know the truth, when you have made adequate atonement, I want to watch you perish in the manner I shall choose.

  “As for the hundredth man,” that gloating whisper continued, “his death by AKKA would spoil my victory. For I intend to return him alive to the System, to tell mankind of my sweet revenge. You may assure your companions—if you wish to revive their hopes—that one of them is destined to survive.”

  The whisper ceased. Jay Kalam dropped the little instrument, and stared about the bare black rock. He saw the little circle of kneeling men and women, still intent upon their game of futile chance. He saw Bob Star’s wife, who had been Kay Nymidee, rising weakly to take their sobbing little child into her arms. He saw Bob Star himself, a lean lonely figure at the end of the rock, standing guard against the monstrous winged things that soared and dived upon the wind beyond.

  “I wonder—” He choked and coughed and gasped for breath. “I wonder if the Basilisk isn’t somewhere near, with his base and whatever equipment he uses. Because we got his voice by ultrawave, without any relay.”

  The choked little gasp from Aladoree brought his eyes back to her haunted, stricken face. Her slender arm was pointing, trembling. And Jay Kalam saw that the half-completed instrument of AKKA was gone from the bench of rock before her. In its place was a little black serpent, crudely shaped of clay.

  16 The Geofractor

  “But I am not Luroa.”

  The violet-eyed girl had closed the door of the tiny cabin upon the racing Phantom Atom, and now the keen endless whine of the hard-driven geodynes came but faintly to her and Giles Habibula.

  “Eh, lass?” The old man blinked his colorless eyes. “But you are!” Perched earnestly on the edge of the narrow bunk in front of him, for his mass overran the only chair, the girl flung back the lustrous mass of her platinum hair, and peered gravely back into the old soldier’s face.

  “I’m no android, Giles Habibula,” she insisted. “I’m as human as you are. I’m Stella Eleroid. I’m the daughter of Dr. Max Eleroid— who was murdered by the Basilisk.”

  A cold light flashed in her violet eyes, and her white face was hardened with a grimness of purpose that seemed to freeze its beauty into marble.

  “When I knew the Legion had failed,” her cold, low voice ran on, “I set out to track down this killer and to recover the geofractor— that was his last and greatest

  invention, the thing that Derron killed him for.”

  “Geofractor?” echoed Giles Habibula. “What in life’s name is that?” He lurched ponderously forward, his small eyes squinting into her face. “But you’re Luroa, lass,” he insisted. “I saw your picture on the posters. There’s a difference in your eyes and your hair, and I’ll grant you to be a gorgeous actress—but you’ll never fool old Giles.”

  “I can explain.”

  With an impatient gesture, the girl caught his massive shoulder. The old man looked a long time into the white, taut beauty of her face, and at last all the doubt melted from his eyes as he smiled.

  “You see, Giles,” she said, “my father and Dr. Arrynu were boyhood friends. They roomed together at Ekarhenium. Each had a vast respect for the abilities of the other. My father used to say that if Arrynu had chosen to live within the law, he could have been the greatest biologist or the greatest artist in the System. Sometimes, during his long exile, Arrynu paid secret visits to the earth, and my father always entertained him. I think he hoped until the end to persuade Arrynu to give up his illicit researches and turn his gifts to something better.”

  She paused for an instant, biting her full lip.

  “I had admired him, since I was a girl,” she continued more slowly. “And on his last clandestine visit, he—well, discovered me. He had always ignored me before, but this time I was older. Seventeen. He began making violent love to me. He was a vigorous and passionate man. The romance of his outlaw life had always intrigued me. He told me about the luxuries and the beauties of the uncharted asteroid where he had his secret stronghold, and begged me to go back with him.

  “And I would have gone. I was young enough—insane enough. I

  thought I loved him.“ Her gray eyes looked beyond Giles Habibula, and for a moment she was silent. ”I’ve sometimes wished I had gone. In spite of everything he did, Eldo was the greatest man I’ve known —except, perhaps, my father.

  “But I told my father, the day we were to leave. He was terribly upset. He began telling me things I had only guessed before, about the unpleasant side of Arrynu’s character—the illegal researches, the manufacture of outlawed drugs, the ring of criminals Arrynu had gathered and dominated.

  “In spite of all that, I was still young enough and mad enough to go, until my father went on to tell me about the androids—the synthetic things like Stephen Oreo, but most of them female, that Arrynu had made and sold. Lovely but soulless criminal slaves, that usually robbed and murdered their pleasure-seeking purchasers and then returned to Arrynu to be sold to another victim.

  “That convinced me. I refused to see Arrynu again. My father talked to him, just once more. I don’t know what was said, but that was the end of their odd friendship. Arrynu returned to his hidden planetoid. I know now what he did there.”

  An old brooding horror darkened the eyes of the girl.

  “He made the thing he called Luroa. Her body had the superhuman strength of the

  androids. Her brain had the same inhuman, pitiless criminal cunning he had given Stephen Oreo. But she was modeled after me. From photographs and his own memory, he created a likeness almost exact.”

  “Ah,” breathed Giles Habibula. “Ah, so. But lass, how does it come that you have been playing the role of that mortal android?”

  “Arrynu kept Luroa with him,” the girl said, “until the Cometeers, guided by that monster he had made himself, fell upon his little secret world. Arrynu was killed. But Luroa escaped. Daring and brilliant and ruthless, she assumed the leadership of her maker’s interplanetary gang. Her exploits soon got the Legion on her trail. It was then that she conceived her most diabolical scheme.”

  The eyes of the girl were almost black, and she paused to shudder. Her hand groped for the great white jewel at her throat, as if it had been a precious talisman.

  “Luroa knew she had been made in my likeness. She planned to steal my identity. She was going to abduct me, from the laboratory where I was trying to carry on my father’s work. She was going to kill my brain with drugs, and let the members of her gang deliver me to the Legion and collect her own reward. And she would step into my shoes.”

  “Ah, a fearful plot!” Giles Habibula leaned forward anxiously. “And what happened?”

  “My father had warned me of such a possibility,” the girl said gravely. “After his death, suspecting that she had been responsible, I made certain preparations. When Luroa came, I was ready. It was not she who won, but I.”

  Giles Habibula surged to his feet and pulled her unceremoniously to him and set a very enthusiastic kiss upon her lips.

  “Good for you, lass!” he cried. “So you beat the android at her own mortal game? But why didn’t you report the matter to the Legion? And claim your just reward?”

  The girl’s face grew very sober again.

  “It might have been hard to prove that I was not Luroa. Besides, that same day I learned that my father’s murderer had escaped from the Devil’s Rock.” Her voice was still and cold. “And the theft of a document from the laboratory a few days later proved that he was using my father’s geofractor. I knew that the Legion had failed— and must continue to fail, against that terrible invention.

  “But Luroa, I thought, might not fail. I became Luroa.”

  “A well-played part,” applauded Giles Habibula. “But, lass, tell me about this stolen invention.”

  The girl sat down again on the edge of the bunk. Her platinum head inclined a moment, listening to the fighting whine of the geodynes. Her slender hand unconsciously touched the ready butt of her proton blaster, and then the great white crystal at her throat.

  “Don’t worry, lass,” Giles Habibula urged her. “I gave our position and course to Commander Kalam and the fleet. Derron will have no time to look for stowaways.

  But this mortal invention?”

  “You know,” she told him deliberately, “that my father was a geodesic engineer.”

  “Ah so, the greatest,” wheezed Giles Habibula. “His refinements made the old-type geodynes seem primitive as ox-carts. He invented the geopellor, that Derron is so ready with.”

  “Derron’s good with stolen discoveries.” Her white hands clenched, and slowly relaxed again. “But the geofractor,” she said, “is based upon a principle totally new— affording a complete, controlled refraction of geodesic lines.

  “The instrument utilizes achronic force-fields. My father independently discovered the same new branch of geodesy of which Commander Kalam’s expedition got some inkling from the science of the Cometeers.”

  “Ah, so,” Giles Habibula nodded. “Kay Nymidee used something of that sort to escape from the comet.”

  “But the geofractor, as my father perfected it,” the girl said, “had a power and a refinement of control that the Cometeers apparently never approached. Its achronic fields are able to rotate the world lines of any two objects within a range of several hundred light-years.”

  “Aye, lass.” Giles Habibula smiled as if he understood. “But in other words—?”

  “The geofractor projects two refractor fields,” the girl told him. “Each unit is able to deflect the geodesic lines of any object out of the continuum, and wrap them back again at any point within its range. Which means,” she smiled, “that the object, in effect, is snatched out of our four dimensional universe, and instantly set back again at the other point.

  “There are two coupled units,” she explained, “timed to perfect synchronism, so that each creates a perfect vacuum to receive the object transmitted by the other. That prevents the atomic cataclysms that might result from forcing two objects into the same space at the same tune.

  “That explains why the Basilisk—” she caught her breath, “why Derron has such a way of putting clay snakes and bricks and robots in the place of the things he takes. It balances the transmitter circuits, and saves power.”

  Giles Habibula exhaled a long, amazed breath.

  “So that’s the geofractor!” he wheezed. “Ah, a fearful thing!”

  “So Derron has made it,” the girl whispered bitterly. “But my father intended it for purposes of peaceful communication. He dreamed of a timeless interplanetary express service. He even hoped to make wide stellar exploration possible, so that human colonists could spread across the galaxy.

  “Yet he realized the supreme danger of his discovery. I doubt that he would ever have finished it at all, but for the bitter straits of mankind hi the cometary war. He completed it only as a weapon of last resort—and he provided a shield against it.”

  “Eh?” Giles Habibula stared at her. “A shield?”

  The girl touched her white, six-pointed jewel.

  “This contains a tiny, atom-powered achronic field-coil,” she told him. “It is adjusted to create a spherical barrier zone, that the search and refractor fields of the geofractor cannot penetrate.

  “It is all that has defended me, thus far, from Derron’s stolen power. And he has tried more than once to take it from me—as when he sent that robot to the New Moon to attack me—though he bungled, that time, by killing his own monster too soon.”

  Giles Habibula blinked and squinted at her.

  “Now, lass,” he queried, “now that we know all this—what shall we do about it? Derron is driving out with us toward some unknown object in Draco, and the fleet is pressing mortal close behind us.”

  “That object,” said Stella Eleroid, “must be the geofractor.”

  “Eh!” Giles Habibula started. “But that was a small thing, Jay Kalam said. He said one man could carry it.”

  “The model was, that Derron took,” the girl agreed. “It would have had power enough to carry one man—and itself—away from the island where my father was testing it— the only wonder is that Derron didn’t escape with it then, himself, instead of attempting his stupid pretence of innocence.

  “But it had far too little power for these recent feats. A huge new machine must have been constructed—probably it was built on a planet of another star, possibly with the labor of such robots as the one sent to the New Moon. The thief has had four years, remember, and the model itself solved all problems of transportation.”

  “But, lass—” Giles Habibula shook his head, doubtfully. “If Derron was in the New Moon, and this evil machine ten billions of miles away, then how could he have been the Basilisk?”

  “Remote control,” said Stella Eleroid. “The device was perfected by my father. Something small enough for a man to carry in one hand, but powerful enough to operate the geofractor from almost any distance, with tubular fields of achronic force. Since those same fields can be adjusted to pick up energy, as easily as to transmit it, they can be used for observation as well as control, with no time-lag, and no pickup equipment required.”

  She saw Giles Habibula’s puzzled scowl.

  “That means Derron can operate the geofractor from almost anywhere,” she said. “He’s loaded now with the remote-control apparatus—I felt the hidden wires in his sleeve.” Her white face tightened. “There on the New Moon, he must have felt like a god traveling incognito—able to spy on anybody in the system with no danger of detection, and ready with the geofractor to snatch away everybody who dared oppose his power-madness. Or almost everybody.”

  Nervously, she touched the white jewel again.

  “Then, lass, shall we just wait and keep you hidden?” Giles Habibula urged uneasily.

  “Until Derron brings us to his fearful machine—”

  Crash!

  Something splintered the cabin door behind them. Slivers flew around them, and Chan Derron’s wide shouldered bulk was framed in the ragged opening. One hand clutched the control spindle of his geopellor, and the other leveled the bright needle of a proton blaster.

  The girl’s hand darted for her weapon. But Chan’s fingers tightened on the spindle, and his big body came toward her with the fleetness of a shadow. The nose of his blaster caught hers, and flung it against the bulkhead. A simultaneous kick sent Giles Habibula’s thick cane spinning.

  The geopellor lifted Chan back to the shattered doorway.

  “Some spare blasters in the chest,” he gasped. “And I’m not quite deaf.”

  His weapon covered them while he caught his breath.

  His narrowed eyes swept the white, defiant beauty of the girl, and he smiled grimly.

  “Listen,” he said softly. “Miss Stella Eleroid—I’m glad you’re not Luroa! And Giles Habibula—I thought you had been a loyal Legionnaire too long to desert! Listen—” His weapon gestured emphatically. “I heard all you said. And now we are going to be three together against the Basilisk. For I am going to convince you that I didn’t murder Dr. Eleroid.”

  A little shudder swept the girl’s taut body. The savage hate in her eyes drove Chan a step backward.

  “Think so?” her voice whipped at him. “I don’t!”

  “Ah, lass—wait!” The small eyes of Giles Habibula rolled at her apprehensively. “We’ll listen.”

  “What you said about the geofractor,” he told the trembling, defiant girl, “explains the circumstances of your father’s murder.”

  “Then tell me how it happened,” she challenged him coldly. “You ought to know!”

  “I had that armored room ready, when your father and another man landed with the working model they were to test,” he said quietly. “They went inside and locked the door. I stood guard outside. Admiral-General Samdu, not an hour later, found the door unlocked—that fact is what convicted me. He found Dr. Eleroid’s body, and another, but the working model was gone.

  “The body of the assistant was already stiff hi rigor mortis. That was a point they failed to explain, in the case against me. They simply disregarded it.” Chan Derron’s jaw set grimly. “But rigor mortis never begins hi less than two or three hours after death. The other body found in that room with Dr. Eleroid had been dead probably ten or twelve hours.”

  His somber eyes went back to the girl’s intent white face.

  “You have explained how it must have happened,” he told her. “The murderer had

  already killed your father’s assistant. He had hidden the body, and taken the assistant’s place. It was the murderer who went down into that room with your father. Don’t you think that is possible?”

  The platinum head of Stella Eleroid nodded very slowly, as if unwillingly. Her violet eyes, still very dark, remained fixed on Chan Derron’s face with an intensity almost hypnotic.

  “It is possible,” she whispered reluctantly. “Because my father suffered from an extreme myopia—he couldn’t recognize anyone ten feet from him. And that day he must have been completely absorbed hi his experiment.” She nodded again. “But go on.”

 

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