The court-martial had indeed, when at last the torture of the trial had ended, returned a triple sentence of death, on two counts of murder, and one of treason. But that had been commuted by Commander Kalam, the day he embarked on the great research expedition to the green comet, to life imprisonment at hard labor in the Legion prison on Ebron.

  Chan heard that news in his cell with a sense of sick frustration. He knew that now he would not be allowed to die, any more than he was let live, until that unanswerable question was answered. And the great grim prison on the asteroid, as he had foreknown, brought him no escape from those angrily and incredulously demanding voices.

  The person, even the person of a convicted criminal, was legally safeguarded by the Green Hall. And the tradition of the Legion was against cruel and unusual methods. The safety of mankind was a greater end, however, than the letter of the law, and the Legion existed to guard that safety.

  The court-martial had found adequate circumstantial evidence that Chan Derron had killed Max Eleroid and his assistant, and then, failing to escape with the unknown new device, had somehow disposed of it. The case was absurdly simple. There was only that one question. The entire organization of the Legion moved as ruthlessly to extract the answer from Chan as rollers pressing the juice from a grape. Therein the Legion failed—but only because the answer was not in him.

  Chan lived two years in the prison on Ebron.

  Then he escaped.

  For two years more the Legion hunted him.

  3 The Sign of the Basilisk

  “No.” Jay Kalam lifted weary eyes from the documents stacked before him, on his long desk in the tower of the Green Hall. “Tell Caspar Hannas I can’t talk to him.” His voice was dull with fatigue. “Not tonight.”

  For he was deadly tired. In command of the great research expedition to study the sciences and the arts of the half-conquered comet, he had spent three strange, exhausting years among those scores of amazing worlds beyond the barrier of green.

  For months more, at the permanent depot of the expedition at Contra-Saturn Station, he had toiled to direct the first preliminary analysis and classification of the results of the expedition—recording the hundreds of tremendous discoveries gleaned from those ancient captive worlds.

  Then another, more urgent duty had called him back to Earth. A few apprehensive statesmen in the Green Hall were gaining support for a movement to order the destruction of the departing comet with AKKA. The Commander, in return for the free cooperation of the liberated peoples of the comet, had promised to let them go in peace. Leaving young Robert Star in command of the half-secret, heavily fortified depot, he came back to fight before the Green Hall for the life of the comet.

  Now at last the victory was won. The new Cometeers were gone beyond the range of the greatest telescope, pledged never to return. And Jay Kalam felt slow and heavy now with his long fatigue. A few more reports to complete—secret documents dealing with the dreadful matter-annihilating weapon of the Cometeers—and then he was going to John Star’s estate on Phobos, to rest.

  “But Commander—” The distressed, insistent voice of the orderly hummed through the communicator. “Caspar Hannas is owner of the New Moon. And he says this is urgent—”

  The Commander’s lean face grew stern.

  “I’ll talk to him when I get back from the Purple Hall,” he said. “We’ve already sent Admiral-General Samdu, with his ten cruisers, to help Hannas catch his thief.”

  “But they’ve failed, sir,” protested the orderly. “An urgent message from Admiral-General Samdu reports—”

  “Samdu’s in command.” Jay Kalam’s voice was brittle with fatigue. “He doesn’t have to report.” He sighed, and pushed thin fingers through the forelock of white that he had brought back from the comet. “If the thief is really Chan Derron,” he muttered, “they may fail again!”

  Settling limply back in the chair behind his crowded desk, he let his tired eyes look out of the great west window. It was dark. Beyond the five low points of the dead volcanoes on the black horizon, against the fading greenish afterglow, the New Moon

  was rising.

  Not the ancient satellite whose cragged face had looked down upon the Earth since life was born—that had been obliterated a quarter-century ago, by the keeper of the peace when Aladoree Anthar turned her secret ancestral weapon upon the outpost that the invading Medusae had established there.

  The New Moon was really new—a glittering creation of modern science and high finance, the proudest triumph of thirtieth century engineering. The heart of it was a vast hexagonal structure of welded metal, ten miles across, that held eighty cubic miles of expensive, air-conditioned space.

  Far nearer Earth than the old Moon, the new satellite had a period of only six hours. From the Earth, its motion appeared faster and more spectacular because of its retrograde direction. It rose in the west, fled across the sky against the tide of the stars and plunged down where the old Moon had risen.

  The New Moon was designed to be spectacular. A spinning web of steel wires, held rigid by centrifugal force, spread from it across a thousand miles of space. They supported an intricate system of pivoted mirrors of sodium foil and sliding color niters of cellulite. Reflected sunlight was utilized to illuminate the greatest advertising sign ever conceived.

  The thin hand of the Commander had reached wearily for the thick sheaf of green-tinted pages headed: REPORTS OF THE COMETARY RESEARCH EXPEDITION,

  J. KALAM, DIRECTOR. REPORT CXLVIII: PRELIMINARY ACCOUNT OF METHODS AND EQUIPMENT FOR THE IRREVERSIBLE REDUCTION OF MATTER TO RADIANT NEUTRINOS. But the rising sign, as it had been designed to do, held his eyes. A vast circle of scarlet stars came up into the greenish desert dusk. They spun giddily, came and went, changed suddenly to a lurid yellow. Then garish blue-and-orange letters flashed a legend:

  Tired, Mister? Bored, Sister? Then come with me—The disk became a red-framed animated picture of a slender girl in white, tripping up the gangway of a New Moon liner. She turned, and the gay invitation of her smile changed into burning words: Out in the New Moon, just ask for what you want. Caspar Hannas has it for you.

  “Anything.” Jay Kalam smiled grimly. “Even the System’s foremost criminals.”

  Find health at our sanatoria! flamed the writing in the sky. Sport in our gravity-free games! Recreation in our clubs and theatres! Knowledge in our museums and observatories. Thrills, and beauty— everywhere! Fortune, if you’re lucky, in our gaming salons! Even oblivion if you desire it, at our Clinic of Euthanasia!

  “But all the same,” Jay Kalam whispered to the sign, “I think I’ll still take the quiet peace of John Star’s home on Phobos—”

  The Commander stiffened, behind his desk.

  For the great sign, where a green flaming hand had begun to write some new invitation, suddenly flickered. It went out. For an instant it was dark. Then red, ragged, monstrous letters spelled, startlingly his own name!

  “KALAM!” Darkness again. Then the fiery scarlet symbols: “G-39!”

  An explosion of red-and-white pyrotechnics wiped that out. One blue spark grew into an immense blue star. The star framed the Moon Girl again. She laughed, and a white arm beckoned.

  But Jay Kalam was no longer watching the sign. For G-39 was his call in the secret emergency intelligence code to be used only in cases of grave necessity. A little chill of cold forewarning shook his hand, as he touched the communicator dial.

  “All right, Lundo,” he told the orderly. “Get me Caspar Hannas on the visiwave!”

  Builder and master of this gaudiest and most glittering of all resorts, Caspar Hannas was a man who had come up out of a dubious obscurity. The rumors of his past—that he had been a space-pirate, drug runner, android-agent, crooked gambler, gang-boss, and racketeer-in-general—were many and somewhat contradictory.

  The first New Moon had been the battered hulk of an obsolescent space liner, towed into an orbit about the Earth twenty years ago. The charter somehow issued to the New Moon Syndicate hi the interplanetary confusion following the First Interstellar War had given that gambling ship the status of a semi-independent planet, which made it a convenient refuge from the more stringent laws of Earth and the rest of the System. Caspar Hannas, the head of the syndicate, had defied outraged reformers— and prospered exceedingly.

  The wondrous artificial satellite, first opened to the public a dec-ade ago, had replaced a whole fleet of luxury liners that once had circled just outside the laws of Earth. The financial rating of the syndicate was still somewhat uncertain—Hannas had been called, among many other things, a conscienceless commercial octopus; but the new resort was obviously a profitable business enterprise, efficiently administered by Hannas and his special police.

  His enemies—and there was no lack of them—liked to call the man a spider. True enough, his sign in the sky was like a gaudy web. True, millions swarmed to it, to leave their wealth—or even, if they accepted the dead-black chip that the croupiers would give any player for the asking, their lives.

  The man himself must now have been somewhat beyond sixty. But as he sat, gigantic and impassive, at the odd round desk in his office, watching the flowing tape that recorded the winnings hi all the halls, sipping the dark Martian beer that never intoxicated him, no onlooker could have guessed his age within a score of years—or guessed anything at all that moved behind his face.

  For the face of Caspar Hannas, men said, had changed with his fortunes. His old face, they said, had reflected his real nature too well. It had showed the scars of too many battles. And it was printed, they whispered, on too many notices of reward.

  The face of Caspar Hannas, now, like the flesh of his great idle hands, was very white—but whiter still, if one looked closely at its vast smooth expanse, were the tiny scars the surgeons had left. It was oddly blank. The only expression that ever moved it was a slow and meaningless smile—a smile that made its white smoothness like the face of a monstrously overgrown idiot child’s.

  The eyes of the man, set far apart and deep in that white bald head, were sharp and

  midnight black. Beyond that idiotic smile, they had a contradictory keenness. But their dark piercing fixity never revealed what was passing in the mind of Caspar Hannas.

  Such a face, men agreed, was singularly useful to a man hi his trade. It was what Jay Kalam waited to see upon the shining oval plate of the visiwave cabinet. (One of the System’s first useful developments from the conquered science of the comet, this instrument utilized the instantaneous achronic force-fields that the lovely fugitive, Kay Nymidee, had used to escape from the comet.)

  The plate flickered, and Jay Kalam saw the vast smooth features of the New Moon’s master. And now not even that senseless smile could hide the apprehension devouring the vitals of Caspar Hannas. For his whiteness had become a ghastly pallor. He was breathless, and his whole gross body trembled.

  “Commander—Commander!” His great voice was dry and ragged-edged with fear. “You’ve got to help me!”

  “What do you want, Hannas?” Jay Kalam asked flatly. “And why was it necessary to use my emergency call—when you already have a Legion fleet detailed to guard your establishment?”

  Still Caspar Hannas smiled that silly baby-smile, but his blank forehead was beaded with fine drops of sweat.

  “Admiral-General Samdu gave the authority,” he gasped. “He agrees that the situation is urgent. He’s here with me now, Commander.”

  “And what’s the trouble?”

  “It’s this man—this monster—who calls himself the Basilisk!” The huge voice was hoarse and wild. “He’s ruining me, Commander. Ruining the New Moon! Time knows where he will stop!”

  “What has he done?”

  “Last night he took another patron. The high winner at baccaret— Clovis Field—a planter from the asteroids. My police escorted him, with his winnings, to his yacht. They got him there, safe. But he was taken out of the sealed air-lock, Commander— with all his winnings!”

  Jay Kalam brushed the white forelock back into his dark hair, impatiently.

  “One more gambler robbed?” His tired eyes narrowed. “That has happened many a time on the New Moon, Hannas—when you didn’t think it necessary to call the Legion.”

  A queer tensity stiffened that white, foolish smile.

  “Robbed—but that isn’t all, Commander. Clovis Field is dead. His body has just been found in the pre-crematory vault at the Euthanasia Clinic. And his right hand is closed on one of those little black clay snakes that this Basilisk uses to sign his crimes!”

  “What killed him?”

  “Strangled!” boomed Caspar Hannas. “With a green silk scarf.” In his deep black eyes, behind that mindless mask, Jay Kalam saw the glitter of a terrible light. Accusing or triumphant—he didn’t know which. “It is embroidered in gold, Commander,” said the great voice of Hannas, “with the wings of the Legion of space!”

  Jay Kalam’s lean face tensed.

  “If any Legion man was guilty of this crime, he will be punished,” he said. “But I see no need to call on me so soon. What’s the matter with your own police? You have ten thousand of the toughest men hi the System. Put them on the trail.”

  The black eyes had a glazed expression.

  “Commander, you don’t understand. It—it’s uncanny! The air lock on the yacht was sealed—and stayed sealed. The vault was locked—and not unlocked. Nobody could have done the things. Nobody—”

  “I advise,” said Jay Kalam, “that you examine some of your own employees. You say that Admiral-General Samdu is with you? Please put him on.”

  The smooth white face was replaced by a cragged ugly red one, equally gigantic. Beneath his snow-white hair, the features of Hal Samdu were stiff with an awed bewilderment.

  The Commander smiled a greeting.

  “Well, Hal, what is your emergency?”

  The battered red face twisted, and the blue eyes of Hal Samdu grew dark as if with pain.

  “I don’t just know, Jay.” His deep voice was worried. “There’s not much you can put a finger on.” His own big fingers were clenched into baffled fists. “But it is an emergency, Jay! I know it. I can feel it. The beginning of something—dreadful! It may turn out to be as bad as the Cometeers!”

  Jay Kalam shook his tired dark head.

  “I don’t see anything that grave—”

  Hal Samdu leaned forward and his great battered impotent fist came up to the screen.

  “Well, Jay,” he rumbled, “maybe you’ll listen to this!” His voice sank, with an unconscious caution. “I’ve been on the Derron case you know, ever since we got back from the comet. Well, I haven’t caught him—there was never such a man! But I’ve got clues. And, well—”

  His tone dropped lower still.

  “Commander, I’ve got evidence enough that this Basilisk is Chan Derron!”

  “Quite possible.” Jay Kalam nodded.

  “There was no Basilisk until after Derron got out of prison,” argued Hal Samdu. “Soon after, there was. He began with small things. Experiments. He’s trying out his

  power—the weapon he murdered Max Eleroid to get! Time knows how he hid the thing on that rock, when we combed every square inch—unless he could have used a geopeller. But he has it—some frightful unknown thing!”

  The great hands twisted together, in a baffled agony.

  “And he’s getting more confident with it. Bolder! Every job he tries is more daring. And tune knows where he will stop!” The great rugged knob of his Adam’s apple jerked. “I tell you, Jay, the man who robbed and murdered Clovis Field can do anything—anything!”

  Hal Samdu’s voice dropped again. It was cracked and shaken with alarm.

  “I don’t like to speak of this, Jay, on the wave. But if this Basilisk —if Derron—can do what he did tonight, then she isn’t safe! Or— it!”

  Jay Kalam stiffened. He could not fail to know what Hal Samdu meant by she and it. He and the giant, with old Giles Habibula, had been too long the guards of Aladoree Anthar and the priceless secret that she guarded; the mysterious weapon, designed by the symbol AKKA, whose very existence was the shield of mankind.

  If the keeper of the peace was—

  “All right, Hal,” he said. “I’ll come out to the New Moon—”

  “And one thing more, Jay—” The rugged face remained stiffly anxious. “Bring Giles Habibula!”

  “But he’s on Phobos,” protested the Commander, “and Mars is a hundred degrees past opposition. It would take half a day to get him. And I don’t see—”

  “Call John Star,” begged the big Legionnaire, “and have him bring Giles to meet you. Drunk or sober! For we’ll need Giles, Jay, before this thing is done. He’s getting old and fat, I know. But he has a gift —a talent that we’ll need.”

  “All right, Hal,” Jay Kalam nodded. “I’ll bring Giles Habibula.”

  “Thank you, Commander!” It was the great hoarse voice of Caspar Hannas. Into the visiwave plate, beside Hal Samdu’s unkempt head, the smooth white face of Hannas crowded, smiling idiotically. “And—for Earth’s sake—hurry!”

  Jay Kalam put through his call to Phobos by ultrawave—the faster visiwave equipment, still experimental, had not yet been installed there. He ordered the Inflexible—powerful sister ship of the murdered Invincible—made ready to take off. He was on his feet, to leave the office, when he saw the little clay serpent.

  It lay on the thick green sheaf of the report that he had been working over a few minutes before. And, beneath it, was a folded square of heavy, bright-red paper.

  “Huh!” His breath caught sharply. Now how did that come here?

  He looked quickly around the room. The heavy door was still closed, the orderly sitting watchful and undisturbed beyond its vitrilith panel. The windows were still secure, the grates over the air ducts intact.

  “It couldn’t—”

  Certainly he had seen no movement, heard no footsteps. The Cometeers had known invisibility, but even an invisible man must have opened a door or a window. Baffled, aware of a cold prickling touch of dread, he shook his head and picked up the serpent.

  That was crude enough. A roughly molded little figurine, burned black. It lay in a double coil, head across the tail, so that it formed the letter B.

 

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