“The murderer—the real Basilisk—is obviously a very clever man,” Chan continued. “We know he had already been spying on your father. He must have planned the thing very carefully. His risk was great—but taken for a tremendous stake.

  “Once in that locked room, he watched your father test and demonstrate the invention. And then, when he had learned all he had to know, he killed the inventor. He used the geofractor to bring the stiffened body of the actual assistant from wherever he had hidden it. He used it again to take the blaster out of my belt. He drove the bayonet into your father’s body, and unlocked the door, and finally removed himself and the working model—leaving everything arranged to convict me of the crime.”

  He searched the girl’s fixed white face.

  “You believe me,” he whispered hoarsely. “Don’t you, Stella?”

  “I—I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I want to—but who is the Basilisk?”

  “Ah, that’s the mortal question!” Giles Habibula gasped. “Perhaps you speak the truth, Captain Derron—and if you do, this criminal has done you a fearful wrong indeed. But there’s still a monstrous mass of evidence against you.”

  “Won’t you trust me?” Chan begged hopelessly. “Just until we reach the geofractor. I think it will tell us who our enemy really is.”

  “My orders are to bring you back,” the old soldier said bleakly. “And the fleet is already close behind us. But, if you’re willing to surrender, I’ll take your case to Commander Kalam—”

  Chan Derron’s face set grimly.

  “I’ll not surrender,” he said. “I know the fleet is close behind. And we haven’t cathode plates to keep up full speed—they may soon be in range, with the vortex gun. But I’m going on to the geofractor. If you won’t help—”

  His weapon gestured ominously. A dull green gleam flashed from a finger of the hand that held it, and Giles Habibula blinked.

  “Eh, lad!” he gasped. “Your ring—where’d you get that ring?”

  “It was my mother’s,” Chan Derron said. “She had the stone reset for me.”

  “Let me see it.” The old man held out a trembling hand. “It’s Venusian malichite?

  Carved into a die? The spots all threes and fours?” He scanned Chan’s big body with an odd intentness. “Tell me, lad—who was your mother? Where did you get this stone?”

  “The jewel belonged to my grandmother.” Chan stared at him blankly. “She was a Venusian singer. Her name was Ethyra Coran!”

  “Ethyra Coran!”

  The eyes of Giles Habibula were suddenly brimming with tears. His big body heaved out of the chair. He pushed Chan’s blaster unceremoniously aside, and flung his arms about him.

  “What’s this?”

  “Don’t you see?” wheezed Giles Habibula. “Your mother was my own precious daughter. You’re my own blood, Chan Derron. The grandson of Giles Habibula!”

  “Then—” Chan freed himself, stared into the beaming yellow face. “Then—will you help me?”

  “Ah, so!” the old man cried. “And gladly! For no grandson of Giles Habibula could be the Basilisk.”

  With a grave and silent question in them, the eyes of Chan Derron looked at the girl. For a long moment, her level violet eyes met his, dark with another question. At last she nodded slowly.

  “We’ll give you a chance, Chan Derron,” she said. “If you can find the Basilisk.”

  The Final Gamble

  The pursuing fleet crept up behind, in spite of Giles Habibula’s frantic appeals to the Commander. The first shot from the vortex gun came after the Phantom Atom: a vast expanding field of atomic instability that burned strange with deadly radiations and sucked at the fugitive ship with a ruthless attraction.

  “Let me tune your geodynes!” gasped Giles Habibula, as the tiny vessel fought that consuming maelstrom. “I’ve been an engine man for fifty precious years, and I can coax the generators to more than they can do.”

  And, indeed, when his deft hands had retuned her geodynes, the tiny vessel began to draw ahead again. The second whirling field of atomic disruption groped after them with weaker fingers; the third flamed and died far behind. And the Phantom Atom was many hours ahead of the fleet, when they came to the geofractor.

  Chan Derron’s brain was staggered by that machine’s immensity, and baffled by its strangeness. Against the star-shot dark of space hung two great spheres of blacker blackness. Three colossal rings, set all at right angles, bound each of them; and between them, connecting them, was a smaller cylinder of the same dully gleaming metal.

  “It looks a little bit like a twenty-million ton peanut,” he muttered. “But I never saw

  anything so black as those great globes!”

  “They are not anything,” said Stella Eleroid. “They are simply holes in the continuum of our universe. That blackness is the darkness of a lightless hyperspace.

  “It is through those holes that the geodesies are refracted,” she said. “They are held open by the achronic field coils in the rings about them. There are four rings about each globe of force—the three that you see, and a fourth that has been rotated into hyperspace.

  “Except for size—miles, to feet—this machine is almost identical with my father’s model. The controls, no doubt, and the atomic power tubes that activate the field coils, are in the central cylindrical structure.”

  “Eh?” murmured Giles Habibula. “And we may find the Basilisk there?”

  “We may,” the girl said. “But I think not. The remote-control system would make it needless for him to remain here. But doubtless the machine is safeguarded. We may meet some of his robots.”

  “But that mortal power?” The eyes of Giles Habibula rolled fearfully. “The force that snatches men |way—”

  “It can’t reach us.” The girl toufched her white jewel again. “So long as this device is intact, and we keep close together. But if we separate—or it is lost—”

  “Ah, lass, we’ll cling to you!” cried Giles Habibula. “And defend it well!”

  Circling the dark mass of the geofractor, that hung in space like an elongated planetoid, they found an entrance valve in the wall of the enormous cylinder between the two black spheres. No weapon, nor any sign of alarm, met their approach. Magnetic anchors held the Phantom Atom beside the valve, and the three emerged, clinging close together, in white space armor.

  A massive and intricate combination lock stopped them at the outer valve.

  “Ah, here is a barrier that could stop all the Legion,” muttered Giles Habibula. His fingers, in their flexible metal gloves, began spinning the dials. He set his helmet against the heavy door, to listen. “All the Legion!” he wheezed again. “But not the precious dying genius of old Giles Habibula.”

  The colossal armored door slid deliberately aside, and they came into the great chamber of the valve. Another lock, at the inner gate, yielded as readily, and they emerged into the mysterious interior of the machine.

  Chan’s first impression was of staggering immensity. A dull violet light, from endless banks of gigantic power tubes, gleamed dimly upon the square masses of huge transformers, black cables writhing like incredible serpents, and the maze of titanic girders that supported all the mechanism.

  His armored hand gripped his blaster, but no movement met them. No living thing was visible. There was no sound save that from the generators and transformers—a humming so mighty and deep that it became a roar.

  Already, with a swift certainty of purpose, Stella Eleroid was leading the way along a

  narrow cat-walk, out through that web of unknown energies. Giles Habibula opened another locked door, and they entered a long dun-lit chamber that was obviously a control-room. Illuminated dials and gauges shone in endless rows, signal lights flashed, signal bells rang, automatic switches made an endless muffled clicking.

  Eerily, this room was also empty. Sweeping it with the muzzle of his blaster, Chan Derron shuddered. This mass of untended mechanism was somehow uncanny, as if it had been itself alive.

  “The Basilisk is not here,” said Stella Eleroid. “I hardly expected him to be. But I believe I can operate the geofractor—I was my father’s assistant, until he decided the job was too dangerous for me. We can disconnect the remote control, and use the search fields to look for him.”

  “Good,” Chan said. “I think I know where to look. Try the vicinity of the red star Ulnar XIV, about eighty light-years north. Here are the heliocentric coordinates of the position.”

  He gave her the scrap of paper he had found hi Hannas’ vault. She turned to the long maze of untended controls. She held hurried little conferences with Giles Habibula, as the old man went to work beside her, his fat hands as familiarly skillful, Chan thought, as if they had built everything they touched.

  Gripping his blaster, peering this way and that, Chan kept an anxious watch. It began to seem to him that the humming emptiness of this space was more terrible than a horde of the Basilisk’s robots would have been—until he heard a familiar feral purr, and saw green-winged horror flapping at the farther end of the long room.

  This time he knew that the central crimson eye was a vulnerable point. His white ray flashed. The monster fell, sprawling weirdly over a bank of dials, before it could lift the Legion-type blaster hi its own green tentacles.

  “Don’t worry,” Chan called to Giles and the girl. “I got it!”

  But the violet eyes of Stella Eleroid were startled and grave.

  “We had the remote control disconnected half an hour ago,” she told him. “The arrival of that monster means that the Basilisk has another geofractor hi operation— somewhere!” She paused to shudder. “He may send us something else!”

  Chan Derron resumed his apprehensive watch.

  “We’ve found it, Chan!” came the girl’s eager voice an hour later. Her eyes were fixed upon a tiny, shielded screen, in a little oblong control-box. “The place where the geofractors must have been built. It’s on a great planet that circles the red star. In the middle of a high plateau, there’s a clearing in the jungle. Mines. Furnace stacks. Metal roofs of factories. The foundation, miles long, where the geofractors must have been built. A sort of robot-city—I see thousands of the winged robots, wheeling about. Some of them fighting, I think, with their real-life originals at the edge of the jungle. The Basilisk must have begun by building robots, and setting them to build others—”

  “But the Basilisk, himself?” broke in the anxious nasal wheeze of Giles Habibula. “Where’s the mortal Basilisk?”

  Stella Eleroid shook her platinum head—and Chan wondered briefly which was real: the blond curls and violet eyes of Vanya Eloyan, or the red-mahogany hair and grey-green eyes he had learned to know from the posters of the android Luroa?

  “There are no human beings in sight,” she said. “Only those robots.”

  “Keep searching, lass!” gasped Giles Habibula. “The criminal must be somewhere. And all those people he took away.”

  Chan Derron stood his endless watch. The girl moved delicate controls and watched a screen inside that hooded box.

  “Here!” she whispered at last. “A spot that must be ten thousand miles from that city of robots, in the middle of a reddish ocean. There was a shadow that the search field could hardly pierce—a barrier field, I suppose, set up by some device like my own.”

  She touched the white jewel.

  “But I’ve broken through it—the device is not quite so perfect as my father would have made it. I can see a tiny rock, crowded with people fighting—”

  Her voice died away. She bent closer, shaking her head as if with pity.

  “People?” Chan whispered sharply. “Who?”

  “I can’t see,” she whispered. “All their faces are masked—maybe against some gas, because they’re all coughing. A ragged, pitiful lot. The water seems to be rising, and they are most of them fighting for higher places on the rock. Creatures like that robot are flying over them, and great black armored monsters are leaping out of the rising sea.”

  Giles Habibula was blinking intently over her shoulder.

  “Ah, so!” he breathed. “The luckless victims of the Basilisk. There’s Kay, the poor lass—all bandaged. Her child—and Bob Star!” His thin voice became a sort of wail. “And there’s the keeper —ill. Unconscious, it looks. And John Star lifting her to a higher place. Ah, frightful death is hovering near them all.”

  He caught a sobbing breath.

  “Aye, and now I see those three scoundrels from the New Moon. Hannas and Brelekko and John Comaine. They are playing some dice game—all but Comaine. And the little gambler, Abel Davian, is with them—still with his book and his mortal calculator. Playing their blessed lives away, for pebbles, while wicked death creeps down upon them!”

  His quivering fingers caught the girl’s arm.

  “You must set them back on Earth,” he gasped. “And quickly— before they all perish!”

  But she shook her head.

  “I can’t do it,” she said helplessly. “That barrier field is almost as good as mine. It takes all the power we have to drive a search field through it. We can’t get through

  with a refractor field—not to pick up even one of them.”

  Chan Derron was beside her, breathless.

  “Then, Stella,” he demanded, “can you set me on the rock?”

  “No,” she told him. “That’s as impossible as lifting them away. But why?”

  His dark-stained eyes were narrowed and savage.

  “I think the Basilisk is there on the rock—hiding inside that barrier field and watching his victims die,” he said grimly. “I’m going after him. If you can’t set me on the rock, drop me as near it as you can.”

  “Into that dreadful sea.” Her eyes were dark with concern. “Chan, you’ll be killed!”

  “Thanks, Stella.” He grinned at her, very briefly. “But I think the

  Basilisk is one of those people on the rock—and I have one clue to his identity. I’m going to test it—if there’s time enough. Won’t you help?“

  “I’ll help.” A brief light shone in her eyes and was extinguished with dread. “Go to the other end of the room. Beyond the range of my barrier field. And—” her voice caught. “Goodbye, Chan!”

  He was already striding away.

  “Aye, farewell,” Giles Habibula called after him. “My grandson!”

  At the other end of the long, dusky control room, Chan Derron paused and raised his hand. The girl looked at him for a moment, and then turned very suddenly to the little box beside her.

  A savage, penetrating vibration throbbed through all Chan’s body. The girl and old Habibula and the strange room were all whipped away. He was flung through frigid blackness, into a world of yellow-green mist.

  Green-winged horror flapped and screamed beside him. He fell through the haze, toward the dark flat sea where larger creatures plunged now and again above the oily surface. The geopellor could have checked him, but still he dived, because he thought the Basilisk might be watching from the rock.

  A dark armored shape rushed at him, beneath the surface. The bolt from his blaster made a volcano of steam. He drove on through it, and reached the rock, and climbed upon that with greenish slime dripping from his silver armor.

  The highest peak of land now stood not five feet above the tide, which still lapped visibly upward. Those left on the rock were fewer than a hundred now; soon there would be none at all.

  He knew most of the masked, gasping, heat-parched human things clinging to the rock, but they paid him little heed. Many were too far gone to care, but one wild creature challenged him, with a blaster, unsteadily leveled, as he tugged to open the face plate of his helmet.

  “The Basilisk!” A calm restraint still ruled that rasping voice, and he recognized the

  Commander of the Legion. “He’s come to mock us!” Jay Kalam cried. “Kill him.”

  That feeble cry went unheard, however, and the blaster, exhausted with firing at the winged things above, flickered harmlessly and died.

  “The wrong man, Commander,” Chan whispered swiftly. “I’m not the Basilisk—but I do have evidence that he’s hiding here among you. Will you let me look for him?”

  The chlorine-reddened eyes still seemed sane.

  “If we’ve been wrong—” Jay Kalam choked and coughed and nodded weakly. “Go ahead, Derron. Whatever you find, we’ve little more to lose.”

  “Guard the keeper.” Chan thrust his own blaster into the Commander’s startled hands. “I think the Basilisk is here—but I want to make a test.”

  Stripping off the metal gloves of his space armor, he flung them down on the rock and gathered up a handful of small black pebbles. He strode on to the level ledge, scarcely a foot above the water now, where Hannas and Brelekko and little Abel Davian and a few other masked, strangling men and women still knelt about their futile game, while John Comaine looked on with an expression of stolid hostility from beside his mysterious black box.

  He paused a moment to peer at that box. The remote-control device that operated the geopellor was surely something no larger. He wished for an instant that he had kept the blaster—but still he had the test to make. He dropped to his knees, beside gaunt Brelekko, and heaped the pebbles before him.

  “I’ve come to join your game,” he said.

  The yellow, bright-ringed claw of Brelekko shook the dice and rolled them. He said nothing at all. But Caspar Hannas, smiling behind his bandages that mindless smile that was the only one upon the rock, gasped hoarsely:

  “Welcome, stranger. Though our game must soon be over—for all but one of us. That’s the real gamble, now. Because the Basilisk has promised, Commander Kalam says, that one of us is to be returned alive to the System.”

  “One of you.” Chan nodded bleakly. “But that’s no gamble, because it lacks the element of chance. The man to be saved is the Basilisk himself.”

  “Huh!” Gaspar Hannas gulped and stared and shook his head. “He couldn’t be here—”

  “There’s evidence that he is,” Chan said. “I suppose cowardice has helped to bring him to this least expected hiding place, here among his hopeless victims; and I imagine, too, that he is getting a sadistic satisfaction out of watching them die.” He paused to look sharply at the broad face of Hannas, but its white idiocy still was unchanged. “Let’s play,” he said. “And please ask Dr. Comaine to join us.”

 

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