Hannas made a gasping grunt at John Comaine. The big engineer nodded sullenly. Stiffly awkward, and moving with a visible reluctance, he left his instrument and came to kneel in the circle.

  Chan took the dice from the talons of Brelekko, and rolled a seven. Raking in the

  pebbles he had won, he brushed the fingers of Hannas and Brelekko. He lost, and put the dice in the hand of tattered little Abel Davian—and watched that lean gray hand with narrowed eyes.

  The ragged little gambler was tapping the keys of his silent calculator again, when Chan saw the angry red welts lifting on his fingers. Chan was leaning to peer at the calculator, when muted screams, from throats burned raw with chlorine, drew his eyes upward.

  The sullen sun stood now at the zenith, and against its dull-red face he saw the black shape of the geofractor—or the stand-by machine, this must be; the one that had been used to send that attacking robot into the other. The black shadow of it was spreading swiftly across that sinister disk.

  It was falling!

  Cold with fear, he understood this desperate last gambit of the Basilisk. The criminal had shielded this rock against the refractor fields. The barrier must be maintained— against Stella Eleroid, at the controls of the other geofractor. But, even if the stand-by machine couldn’t reach through the barrier, it would still fall through.

  Swiftly, it grew in the sky. Watching it, listening to the gasps and sobs of all those who waited hopelessly for its millions of tons of metal to crush them into that acid sea, Chan failed for a moment to hear the deep sudden purring in the air around Him.

  When he did hear it, and knew that the barrier had been lifted, he moved very quickly. His great hand snatched the little calculating machine out of Abel Davian’s swelling fingers. He smashed it against the ledge, seized a rock, and crushed the fragments to scrap and dust.

  “Why, sir?” The little gambler blinked bewilderedly at him through thick lenses. “What are you doing?”

  “Conducting an allergy test,” Chan rapped at him.

  “I don’t understand you, sir!”

  Chan glanced up at the stupendous shape of the falling geofractor and around him at the silent exiles crouching on the rock. They awaited its impact, he thought, almost with gratitude.

  “We’ve probably three minutes.” He grinned bleakly at Abel Davian. “And you ought to be interested in this test—since you are the one who showed a positive reaction.”

  “I—what do you mean sir?”

  “Four years ago,” Chan Derron told him, “when I helped Dr. Eleroid’s pseudo-assistant carry his working model of the geofractor down into that armored room where he was killed, the man contrived to keep me from seeing his face—he muffled himself against the cold, and made me walk in front, and kept leaning over the box. However, it happened that my hand touched his. I saw rapid red swellings rising upon his fingers, and I noticed that he sneezed.”

  Chan’s darkened eyes stabbed at the cringing gray man.

  “When I learned a little while ago how the crime was carried out, I happened to remember that you began to sneeze as you came toward me in the Diamond Room on the New Moon, just before you vanished—and I had wondered already how it came that you had the audacity to win on that particular night. All that was enough to suggest the possible utility of your portable calculator.”

  Rigid, pale, Abel Davian stood feebly shaking his head.

  “I contrived to touch your hands, just now,” Chan’s harsh voice raced on. “And I observe again the symptoms of an extreme allergy sensitive to my body. That is a rare but proven phenomenon—the proteids of one human body acting as allergens to another. Its very rarity made the identification quite positive—even before I had confirmed it by proving that your calculating machine was the portable remote-control box through which you operated the geofractors, Mr. Basilisk.”

  Ashen, palsied, the little man was cowering back from him. His hunted eyes flashed up at the enormous bulk of the falling geofractor, swelling ever more swiftly in the greenish sky. They came back to Chan, magnified by the thick lenses, lurid with a triumphant hatred.

  “What if I am the Basilisk?” his shrill voice whined defiantly. “I’m still the winner— because I’ve had my revenge, and none of you can escape. If we had three minutes— now I think we’ve less than two.”

  “Perhaps it doesn’t matter.” Nodding almost abstractedly, Chan turned from that colossal falling mechanism and the silent people waiting for it. “But still there’s something I’d like to know.” He scowled at the trembling gambler. “Why should you want revenge— upon so many of us?”

  “Because my people were Purples.” Savagery twisted Davian’s thin gray face. “My mother’s family had once been favorites of the emperors. I believe my real father was Eric the Pretender. It was the Green Hall that crushed the empire, and drove us into exile.” His narrow shoulders stiffened with a supercilious pride. “But for all of you— the Legion and the Council and the keeper of the peace, I should have been a prince of the Purple Hall.”

  “I see.” Chan Derron glanced sadly at the limp, unconscious form of the keeper of the peace and John Star standing guard beside her— and his breath caught.

  “But that isn’t all you’ve done,” Davian’s bitter voice ran on. “I’ve been trying all my life to recover something of the wealth and honor that was rightly mine—and all of you have always crushed me back again, into hunger and rags and shame.”

  “Eh?” Chan looked at him sharply. “How’s that?”

  “I studied science,” rasped the little man. “I took the name of Enos Clagg, because you all had come to hate my father’s—”

  “Enos Clagg?” Chan nodded in recognition. “And you built illegal robots!”

  “Military robots,” Davian whispered huskily. “I hoped to restore the empire with them. But we were betrayed to the Green Hall. The Legion tracked me down. I served three years on Ebron—dreaming of ways to settle the score.”

  Scarcely listening to him, Chan had looked back at that enormous falling machine. Now its black mass filled half the sky. A fantastic greenish twilight was falling fast upon the rock. A chlorine-poisoned wind stirred suddenly.

  “After I was pardoned from Ebrofi,” Davian’s bitter voice rushed on, “I saw that I must be more subtle. I came to Earth, with a little money my mother had saved, and took the name I wear. I met a girl, and fell in love, and married her. She wanted me to forget my plans, and for a little while I almost did.”

  His savage eyes flashed at Caspar Hannas.

  “Until we visited his gambling ship,” he said. “I had studied the mathematics of probability in my cell on Ebron. I was hoping to win back the lost wealth of the Purples. But Hannas robbed me. Hannas and Brelekko and Comaine!” His cracked voice lifted wildly. “They’ve robbed me again and again, every time I scraped up money to go back—and laughed at me because they said I was habitual. That’s why they’re here—to watch me win one game!”

  “But you have lost.” Chan’s voice was lifted, above a sudden deep vibration in the air. “Because the daughter of Dr. Eleroid is at the controls of your other geofractor— and evidently this rock is no longer shielded from it, since I smashed your control box. Just look around you! Already, the keeper and many of the rest have been returned to the System.”

  All the rock was trembling now to a mighty purring. By twos and threes, by little groups, the haggard victims of the Basilisk were vanishing. Familiar articles of furniture, bits of Terrestrial shrubbery and sod, used to balance the circuits, showed that they had been replaced on some kinder planet. In a few moments Chan was left alone with Abel Davian, beneath the many million tons of the falling geofractor.

  “But I don’t think you’ll escape, Mr. Basilisk.” His big hand made a hurried gesture of farewell. “Because Stella Eleroid knows certainly, by now, that you—and not I— killed her father.”

  Then that deep vibration quivered through Chan’s body. Some pellucid screen, it seemed, had fallen between his eyes and the gray stricken face of Abel Davian. The green thickening twilight became a total darkness. And he knew that Stella Eleroid had lifted him from the peril of the rock.

  NOWHERE NEAR

  The Man Who Liked Machines

  Nowhere Near was the name of a point in space. Five black light-years from our Legion base at the closest star, sixty more from old Earth, it was marked by the laser beacon and little else. A relief ship came once a year—when it could get through the anomaly.

  The last Legion ship had not got through, and half our personnel were overdue for rotation. Odd types, they had volunteered because they had expected to enjoy loneliness and mystery and danger. Most of them had found long ago that they did not.

  Our supplies came late, on a private craft chartered for the emergency. A paintless but powerful geodesic flyer, the Erewhon looked like a scarred veteran of less legal missions. Her captain was a squat, shambling man, hard of eye and close of mouth— the sort of civilian likely to need refuge in the hazardous fringes of Nowhere.

  Instead of the men and women we needed to relieve our weary crews, she brought only two passengers—an old soldier and a girl. A queer story and a queerer riddle came with them. The story—all I could learn of it—was told to me by Captain Scabbard when he came aboard the station with a sealed pouch of orders from our sector base.

  The old soldier and the girl, as he told the story, had boarded the chartered flyer in some haste, along with their odd cargo, just before it lifted.

  Trouble came with them.

  His spacemen were not the finest sort, Captain Scabbard admitted. They were not used to discipline, and he suspected that some of them were relieving the hazardous tedium of the long voyage to Nowhere with smuggled drugs. They baited the old soldier and tried to make love to the girl.

  They were used to free companions, the captain said, and they couldn’t understand such a girl. Her proud aloofness just inflamed them. Even the ship’s mate joined the game. On the mate’s watch, they got the soldier drunk, locked him hi his stateroom and attacked the girl in her room.

  Captain Scabbard was still confused about the ending of the story. The girl had disabled two of her attackers, with some unexpected trick or weapon. Angered, the others became uglier than ever. She screamed for the soldier.

  Less drunk than he had seemed, the soldier picked the lock and came out to join the fight. Though he had been disarmed, he and the girl fought five able spacemen. Two had finally fled. The other three, Captain Scabbard believed, had been killed.

  “But we couldn’t find the bodies.” His eyes flickered uneasily back toward the lock, where his passengers were wailing to come aboard the station. “I ain’t makin‘ no formal charges. They ain’t makin’ none. The soldier told me to just forget the incident. But the mate and two more are gone, and we couldn’t find the bodies.”

  He shivered apprehensively.

  “Maybe you never stopped to think how hard it is to get rid of a dead body in a stateroom on a sealed space flyer. It ain’t just hard—it’s impossible! In my time around Nowhere I’ve seen a lot of funny things, but I ain’t never seen nothing to match that soldier and his girl!”

  That’s part of what made the story queer.

  I thanked Captain Scabbard and told him that I would interview his passengers before I let them come aboard the station. He grew angry. He was afraid of them, I soon realized. He wanted to get them off his ship, but I stood firm.

  We had troubles enough already. Nowhere Near had an ugly name in the Legion, for good cause. Duty there was both dull and dangerous.

  A third of our thirty-man crew was normally rotated each year, but the last relief complement had been aboard that lost ship. An unwise search had cost us twelve more lives. The station commander, cracking under the strain, had committed a strange suicide by steering a rescue rocket into the heart of the space called Nowhere.

  His death had left me the acting commander, although my actual promotion had only now arrived in Captain Scabbard’s green-sealed pouch. I was still very young, very conscious of my peculiar duty. With only sixteen men and two free companions, I was standing guard against a danger that none of us understood.

  Old enough to be cynical, most of the men under me had a bitter feeling that Nowhere Near was a forgotten stepchild of the Legion. They had been cruelly jolted when they learned that the Erewhon had brought us no replacements for the missing men or relief for those who had already served long beyond their normal tour of duty. I was prepared for trouble—but not asking for it.

  “You are under charter to the Legion,” I reminded Captain Scabbard. “That means your port and flying orders come from me. This is no place for tourists, and I don’t want the sort of problem you have just reported. Your passengers will have to convince me that they have some legitimate business here.”

  Grumbling sullenly, he agreed to let me interview them in the station lock. When he sent them to meet me there, the first thing I saw was the old soldier’s shocking sloppiness. Out of uniform, he wore a flaming yellow civilian sweater and shapeless old fatigue pants, one leg tucked inside his oversize spaceboots and the other dropping outside. He was short and thick and flabby—scarcely fit for his heroic role in Captain Scabbard’s tale. Yet he came waddling through the great steel valves as confidently as if he had come to take command of the station.

  The nurse followed him, immaculate in white. A glowing, bronze-eyed, athletic girl, she looked too young and fresh and lovely to be so far from the stars men had mastered. A gasp of admiration came from the lock sergeant behind me. My own pulse was quickening— until I saw her ring.

  The ring was a heavy platinum band set with an odd black stone. An unpleasant gem, the dull black stone was carved into a grinning skull with hot ruby eyes that glowed like live coals. That ugly death’s-head struck me with a puzzling shock of evil, because it seemed to deny her clean, strong vitality.

  “Captain Ulnar?” Neglecting to salute, the old soldier stopped to stare at me with eyes like flat wet pebbles. “Captain Lars Ulnar? You want to talk to us?”

  “If you want to come aboard the station.”

  “Why else do you think we’ve come forty trillion miles on Scabbard’s miserable bucket of rust?” His round face was baby-smooth and baby-soft, and it reddened now like an angry infant’s. “We were expecting a warmer welcome. My name’s Habibula. Corporal Giles Habibula.”

  His bald pink head nodded toward the girl.

  “Nurse Lilith Adams. We’re here as guests of the blessed Legion. You have orders to supply us rations and quarters in the station.”

  “I’ve received no such orders.”

  “Our visit was arranged through Legion channels.” His indignant voice was nasal and high, oddly irritating. “Orders to expect us were sent you a year ago.”

  “The ship last year was lost.”

  “We’re well aware of that.” He grimaced pinkly. “We’ve been sweating for a miserable month at your sector headquarters, waiting for a brass-capped fool to arrange our passage on the Erewhon. We were warned that our papers had been on that unlucky ship. We had duplicates sent you more recently, in care of Commander Star.”

  “Commander Star?”

  “Ken Star, commander of the Legion survey ship Quasar Quest.” Indignation buzzed in his high nasal voice. “He’d taken off before we got to sector base. He must have left our papers here.”

  “Commander Star has not been here.” My first astonishment was changing to irritated disbelief. “Not for years, anyhow. I’ve seen his name in the station records. He was the first commanding officer, years before I got here. I’ve never seen him.”

  “Life’s precious sake!” The old man’s mud-colored eyes rolled apprehensively toward the silent girl. “I’m afraid poor Ken has blundered into mortal trouble.” He lurched forward as if he meant to pass me. “Well, Captain, it looks as if you’ll have to take my precious word about those orders.”

  “Hold it, soldier!”

  The riddle was growing queerer. No Legion survey ship had been expected at the station. The old soldier’s tale of lost orders was a bit too pat. He looked too clever. Besides, with his improper uniform and his failure to salute and his irritating insolence, he had ruffled my sense of military fitness.

  “If you are a soldier!” I stepped in front of him. “Have you ever been taught Legion courtesy and discipline?”

  “Mortal well, Captain.” He stopped, but still did not salute. “For most of a mortal century, I’ve been offering Legion courtesy to officers who deserved it. I’ve gladly saluted Commander Kalam and Admiral-General Samdu and the great John Star. But I’m not saluting you.”

  He blinked shrewdly at me, as if daring me to react.

  “Giles!” The girl spoke for the first time. Her low voice was lovely as her face, gentle in cool reproof. “Don’t be a fool!”

  “I mean no disrespect, sir,” the old man wheezed. “If you had read those orders, you would know that I am honorably discharged. We are here as special guests of the Legion—as civilians.”

  “Nowhere Near has several missions.” Now more annoyed than puzzled, I spoke stiffly. “Our first mission is simply to warn shipping away from a dangerous and mysterious anomaly in space. Our second is to observe and report every fact we can

  discover about the nature and the cause of that anomaly. We have no facilities to entertain civilian guests.”

  “Captain Ulnar—please!” The girl stepped forward urgently. “I’m sure Commander Star will arrive with our orders soon. At least you must let us wait for him.”

  I hesitated, because she troubled me. She belonged somewhere else, I thought— perhaps in some fortress like the Purple Hall, along with old masters and old ivory and all the proud creations of man’s great past. She looked too thrillingly alive, certainly, for this deadly exile at the brink of Nowhere.

  “You’ll have to answer some questions,” I said. “Captain Scabbard gave me a very brief account of an incident on the Erewhon. He says the two of you killed three able spacemen. He couldn’t learn how you disposed of the bodies.”

  Old Habibula’s stone-colored eyes squinted blankly out of his pink baby-face. The girl stiffened slightly, lovely and lean and grave, her eyes darkening.

 

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