“I can’t stand it, Jay,” he whimpered. “It’s a turn I can’t endure.” He pointed a trembling yellow thumb at his protruding middle. “Look at Giles Habibula. He’s an old, old man, Giles is. He must ration his precious wine. He must have a cane to aid his limping step. He’ll be dead soon, Giles will.”

  The pale eyes blinked.

  “Ah, so, dead—unless the scientists come at the secret of rejuvenation. And precious soon! There’s a specialist, Jay, on this very New Moon, whose advertising promised that—but John Star wouldn’t let me come!”

  He sighed, sadly.

  “Aye, the whole world plots for the death of poor old Giles. Look at him, Jay. He was drinking up his last miserable drop of happiness at the Purple Hall. For Phobos is a pleasant world, Jay. The sun in its gardens is kind to the aches in an old man’s bones.

  John Star is a generous host—not always rushing famished guests away from his table, Jay!

  “Ah, and it’s a comfort to see Aladoree every day—to see her so happy with John Star, Jay, after all the fearful dangers they’ve come through. A comfort to be near, to guard her, if trouble comes again.”

  His seamed face smiled a little.

  “It gives a lonely, friendless old soldier a tiny mite of happiness, Jay, to dandle Bob Star’s daughter on his knee. And to see Kay herself still so lovely, after all the horror of the comet, and so eager for Bob’s visits home. The next one, the doctors say, is sure to be a son —but that’s a secret, Jay!”

  Leaning heavily back in his chair, the old man sighed again.

  “Old Giles was happy on Phobos, Jay—happy as the shattered wreck of a dying Legionnaire can be. He had his bit of supper, amid the dear familiar faces. He sipped his precious drop of wine. He dozed quietly away—ah, so, and it might have been into a poor old soldier’s well earned last repose! But—no!”

  His pale eyes stared accusingly.

  “He wakes up in a strange cramped bunk. And he finds he is upon a cruiser of the Legion, shrieking through the frigid gulf of space. Ah, Jay, and his dimming old senses feel the shadow of a frightful danger, rushing down upon him! That’s an evil way to serve a defenseless old man, Jay, in his miserable sleep. The shock might stop his heart!”

  His fat hands clutched the edges of the table.

  “ ‘Tis a fearful thing, Jay, to alarm folks so! Ah, it made me think of the Medusae. And that evil man-thing Oreo, and the fearful Cometeers.” He leaned forward, earnestly. “Tell old Giles there’s no alarm, Jay! Tell him it’s only a monstrous joke.”

  His small eyes looked anxiously back and forth, between the grave face of Jay Kalam, and the grimly rugged one of Hal Samdu. His wrinkled face faded slowly, to a paler, sickly yellow.

  “Life’s name!” he gasped. “Can the thing be so mortal serious? Speak, Jay! Tell old Giles the truth, before his poor brain cracks.”

  Rising beside the table, Jay Kalam shook his head.

  “There’s little enough to tell, Giles,” he said. “We have to deal with a criminal, who calls himself the Basilisk. He has got some uncanny mastery of space, so that distance and material barriers apparently mean nothing to him.

  “He began hi a small way, nearly two years ago. Taking things from secure places. Putting notes and his little clay snakes in impossible places—I recently received one in my office in the Green Hall.

  “He keeps attempting something bigger. There have been murders. Now he has served notice that he is going to rob and murder one of the New Moon’s patrons, every day. If he goes on—well, Hal is afraid—”

  “Afraid?”

  Hal Samdu crushed a great fist into the palm of his hand, and towered to his feet.

  “Afraid,” he rumbled. “Aye, Giles, I’m sick and cold with fear. For if this goes on, the Basilisk can take the keeper of the peace as easily as any luckless gambler—”

  “The keeper?” In his own turn, lifting himself with the table and his cane, Giles Habibula heaved anxiously to his feet. His pale eyes blinked at Jay Kalam. “Then why can’t she use—AKKA?” His voice had dropped, almost reverently, as he spoke those symbolic letters. “And so end the danger?”

  The Commander’s dark head shook regretfully.

  “Because we don’t know who the Basilisk is, Giles,” he said. “Or where. Aladoree can’t use her weapon, without a target to train it on. If we can ever discover the precise location of the Basilisk hi space —before he takes her—that is all we need to know.”

  “Aye, Giles,” Hal Samdu rumbled urgently. “And that is why we sent for you. For you have a gift for opening locks, and discovering hidden things.”

  Giles Habibula inflated himself.

  “Ah, so, Hal,” he wheezed. “Old Giles had a spark of genius once —a precious glow of talent that has twice saved the System. And little thanks he got for the saving of it. Ah, once—but it’s rusted now. It is dying. Ah, Jay, you might better have left old Giles to his peaceful sleep on Phobos.”

  His small eyes were blinking at them, swiftly.

  “But we must seek the identity of this master of crime. Have you no clue, Jay? No precious clue at all?”

  “Aye, Giles,” broke in Hal Samdu again. “We’ve clues enough. Or too many. And they all tell the same story. The Basilisk is the convict, Derron.”

  “Derron?” wheezed Giles Habibula. “I’ve heard the name.”

  “A captain in the Legion,” Jay Kalam told him, “Chan Derron was convicted of the murder of Dr. Max Eleroid and suspected of the theft of a mysterious device invented as a weapon for use against the Cometeers. The model was never recovered. Derron escaped from the prison on Ebron, two years ago. The activities of the Basilisk began soon after.”

  A green light blinked above the door.

  “The orderly,” Jay Kalam said. “We must go. Caspar Hannas is expecting us, and we’ve only two hours.”

  “Two hours!” gasped Giles Habibula. “Jay, you speak as if we were condemned and wailing to die.”

  “It’s two hours until midnight, New Moon time,” Jay Kalam explained. “That is when this criminal has promised to appear—and we may have a chance to trap him.”

  Giles Habibula squirmed uneasily. “How do you hope to do that?”

  “We are taking steps,” Jay Kalam answered. “First, the ten cruisers of Hal’s fleet are on guard against the approach of any strange ship. Second, within the New Moon, Gaspar Hannas has promised the full cooperation of his special police—they’ll be on duty everywhere. Third, we will be waiting within the New Moon ourselves, with a score of Legion men in plain clothes.”

  “It is this man Derron, that we must take,” grimly added Hal Samdu. “There’s evidence enough that he’s the one we want. Gaspar Hannas has raised the reward for him to a quarter of a million. We’ve papered all the New Moon with his likeness. The guards, and the players, too, will be alert. If he comes here tonight, we’ll get him!”

  “Ah, so, Hal!” wheezed Giles Habibula. “But if all you’ve told me is true—if distance and walls mean nothing to this strange power with which the Basilisk is armed—then perhaps he can strike down the poor gambler without coming here himself.”

  “Anyhow—” and Jay Kalam beckoned toward the door where the green light was blinking still—“we must go. If he comes, we may take him. If he doesn’t, we may still discover some clue. Anything—”

  His lean jaw set.

  “Anything to tell us where he is, so that he can be destroyed.”

  Gigantic Hal Samdu stalking ahead, Giles Habibula waddling and purring and laboring with his cane behind, they went out of the Commander’s apartment, out through the chart room and the great armored valves of the Inflexible, into the New Moon.

  Gaspar Hannas met them. Huge as Hal Samdu, he was dressed in loose flowing black. The black emphasized the whiteness of his monstrous soft-fleshed hands and his vast smooth face. His black, deepset eyes were distended and darting with fear. Sweat shone on his forehead and his white bald head. But his blank face greeted them with its slow and idiotic grin.

  “Gentlemen!” he gasped hoarsely. “Commander! We must hasten. Time draws short. The guards are posted, and I’ve been waiting—”

  His voice choked off, abruptly, and he started back from Giles

  Habibula. Leaning heavily on his cane, the old man was peering at him. The old soldier’s yellow face broke into a wondering grin.

  “In life’s name!” he wheezed. “It’s Pedro the Shar—”

  The mindless smile congealed on the white lax face of Caspar Hannas, and his huge hands made a frightened gesture for silence. His eyes swept the fat man swaying on the cane, and he whispered hoarsely:

  “Habibula. It’s been fifty years. But I know you. You’re Giles the Gh—”

  “Stop!” gasped Giles Habibula. “For I know you—Caspar Hannas—in spite of your artificial face. And I’ve more on you than you do on me. So you had better hold your

  mortal tongue!”

  He steadied himself, with both hands on the cane, and his pale eyes blinked at the giant in black. “Caspar Hannas!” he wheezed. “The great Caspar Hannas, the New Moon’s master!

  Well, you’ve come a long way, since the time of the Blue Unicorn. You must have eluded the posse hi the jungle—” The big man lifted his hand again, fearfully.

  “Wait, Habibula!” he gasped. “And forget—” “Ah, so, old Giles can forget—for a price.” The old man sighed. “Life has served us mortals different. Here you have made a mighty fortune. Men say the New Moon has made you the System’s richest man. Your poor old comrade is but a penniless veteran of the Legion, starved and friendless and ill.” He quivered to a sob. “Pity old Giles Habibula—”

  “In fifty years, you have not changed!” Admiration rang in the husky voice of Hannas. “What do you want?”

  The yellow face was suddenly beaming. “Ah, Mr. Hannas, you can trust the discretion of Giles Habibula! The luxury of your accommodations here is famous, Mr. Hannas. The excellence of your food. The vintages of your wines.”

  Caspar Hannas smiled his senseless smile.

  “You are the guests of the New Moon,” he said. “You and your comrades of the Legion. You shall have the best.” The fishy eyes of Giles Habibula blinked triumphantly at his companions. “Ah, thank you, Mr. Hannas!” he wheezed. “And I believe that duty is now carrying

  us into your salons of chance. It’s many a long year, Mr. Hannas, since old Giles

  risked a dollar for more than fun. But this meeting has brought the old days back, when the wheels of chance were meat and drink—aye, and life’s precious blood—“

  Caspar Hannas nodded, and his smile seemed to stiffen again. “I remember, Giles,” he said. “Too well. But come. We’ve no time to waste on games.” He looked at the old soldier again, and added reluctantly, “But if you really

  wish to play, the head croupier in the no-limit hall will give you a hundred blue chips.” “I, too, remember,” sighed Giles Habibula. “At the Blue Unicorn—” “Five hundred!” cried Caspar Hannas, hastily. “And let us go.” Jay Kalam nodded, and Hal Samdu stalked impatiently ahead. “Ah, so,” gasped Giles Habibula. “Post your guards. And set your traps. And let’s go

  on to the tables. Let your bright wheels turn, your precious blood race fast as the numbers fall. Let brain meet brain in the battle where wits are the victor. Ah, the breath of the old days is in my lungs again!” He waddled ponderously forward.

  “There’ll be no danger from this Chan Derron,” he wheezed hopefully. “There’s no human being—aye, none but old Giles Habibula himself—could pass Hal’s fleet and the New Moon’s walls and all these guards, to come here tonight.

  “And as for your precious Basilisk—I trust he’ll prove to be no more than some hoax—In life’s name, what was that?”

  Some little dark object had fallen out of the air before him. It had struck the floor and shattered. From the fragments of it, however, he could see that it had been the small figurine of a serpent, crudely formed of black-burned clay.

  ‘You’re Chan Derron!“

  The old Moon has been eclipsed two or three tunes a year, whenever the month-long circuit of its orbit carried it through the diminishing tip of Earth’s shadow cone. The New Moon, nearer the planet, plunged through a brief eclipse every six hours. Upon that fact, Chan Derron made his plan.

  During his strenuous years at the Legion academy, Chan had somehow found time for amateur theatricals. Often enough, in these last two fugitive years, his actor’s skill had served him well. And now he called upon it for a new identity.

  He became Dr. Charles Derrel, marine biologist, just returned from a benthosphere exploration of the polar seas of Venus, now hi search of recreation on the New Moon. His bronze hair was dyed black, his bronze-gray eyes darkened with a chemical stain, his tanned skin bleached to a Venusian pallor. A blue scar twisted his face, where the fangs of a sea-monster had torn it. He limped on the foot that a closing valve had crushed. His brown eyes squinted, against unfamiliar sun.

  “That will do.” He nodded at the stranger in the mirror. “If you ever get past the fleet and the guards.”

  Another bit of preparation, he took the geopeller unit out of a spare space suit and strapped it to his shoulders under his clothing. (The geopeller, invented by Max Eleroid, was a delicate miniature geodesic deflector, with its own atomic power pack. Little larger than a man’s hand, controlled from a spindle-shaped knob on a short cable, it converted an ordinary space suit into a complete geodesic ship. A tiny thing, yet already it had brought many a spacewrecked flier across a hundred million miles or more to safety.)

  The Phantom Atom drifted into the Earth’s shadow cone, beyond the old Moon’s orbit. It dropped inertly Earthward. Hal Samdu’s patrolling cruisers set red points to blazing on the detector screens, but they would not discover Chan so easily, for the few tons of his ship were as nothing, against their many thousands. And the powerful, ever-shifting gravitational, magnetic, and electrostatic fields of the Earth far reduced the sensitivity of any detector hi the planet’s close vicinity.

  The Earth grew beneath him. A great disk of denser darkness, it was ringed with

  supernal fire, where the atmosphere refracted the hidden sun’s rays into a wondrous circle that blazed with the red essence of all sunsets. The silvery web of the spinning sign slid into that ring and vanished in the dark.

  With a careful hand on the vernier-wheel, straining his eyes in the famt red dusk, Chan Derron found it again. He piloted the Phantom Atom to the motor-house that controlled a great flimsy mirror of sodium foil out at the rim of that vast wheel, and locked the ship against it with a magnetic anchor.

  Slipping into white, trim-fitting metal, Chan snapped his blaster to its belt, and went out through the valve. One bolt from his blaster severed the power leads. And he waited, at the mirror’s edge, until the sun came back. The great sheet burned with white fire, and the little ship behind it lay hidden in total darkness. But if the mirror turned—

  At last the technician arrived, sliding up a pilot wire from the metal star of the New Moon’s heart, carrying a kit of tools to repair the disabled unit. Gripping the control-spindle of the geopeller, Chan flung himself to meet him.

  They sprawled together in space. The technician, after his first surprise, displayed a wiry strength. He groped for his atomic torch, that would have cut Chan’s armor like paper.

  “I’ve got a blaster.” Vibration of metal in furious contact carried Chan’s words. “But I don’t want your life—only your number and your keys.”

  “Derron!” The man’s face went white within his helmet. “The convict—we were warned.” Chan grabbed for the torch. But the fight had gone out of the other. Limp with terror, he was gasping: “For God’s sake, Derron, don’t kill me. I’ll do anything you want!”

  His name, it seemed to Chan, had grown stronger than his body! And more dangerous than any enemy. Swiftly, he took the prisoner’s tools, his work-sheet, his keys, and the number-plate—a black-stencilled yellow crescent—from his helmet. With the man’s own torch, he welded the shoulder-piece of his armor to the motor-house.

  “In three hours,” Chan promised, “I’ll be back, and let you go.”

  He grasped a sliding ring on the pilot wire, and the geopeller sent him plunging down five hundred miles to the New Moon’s heart. The wire brought him to a great platform, on one of the vast tubular arms of the central star. He dropped amid half a score of other men, all with kits of tools, and hastened with them into a great air-valve.

  His own face looked at him, from the wall of the valve. $250,000 REWARD! shrieked crimson letters. LOOK! This man may be beside you—NOW!

  At a wicket, as he filed with the others out of the valve, he turned in his captured work-sheet. “Inspect and repair Mirror 17-B-285” was the order at its head. He scrawled at the bottom of it, Defective switch located and repaired.

  How long would he have, he wondered, before some other repairman, sent out to do a better job, would find the first welded to the motor-house beside the Phantom Atom? But if he had won just three hours—

  In the locker rooms, where the men were squirming out of their metal, hastening under the showers, gratefully donning their clothing, he saw that ominous poster again. And all the talk he heard was of Chan Derron and the Basilisk, and whether the two could be the same, and whether the promised robbery and murder would be carried out at midnight.

  Chan Derron found the locker to which his borrowed number corresponded. He hung up his suit, hastily donned the somewhat-too-small lounging pajamas and loose cloak that he discovered there, and thrust himself into a group of tired men bound for home and supper.

  “Keep yer optics hot,” advised a little mechanic beside him. “Any big man you see tonight might be good for that quarter million. You don’t know who—”

  “You don’t know who,” Chan agreed.

  He left the workmen, and a little door let him out upon the vast, noisy open space beneath the docks, thronged with incoming passengers from the space liners above. He closed the door, and sighed with relief. For he had passed the fleet, and the New Moon’s walls, and the alert inspectors scrutinizing every man that came down the gangplanks above. He was safe—

 

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