Most of those few yet at the table were the plain-clothes men of the Legion. But the big pale man who gave the name of Charles Derrel had pushed through to join them, with the tall blond beauty at his side. Brelekko turned to stand beside the croupier, peering through a monocle at the wheel. The engineer in white, John Comaine, had moved his mysterious equipment to the end of the table; the phones were on his head, and he was fussing with the instrument panel.
The only actual player left at the table—and, obviously, the focus of all the expectant strain that filled that hushed, watching circle— was the little ragged man, Abel <
Davian.
His stacks of chips were taller now, and he was trembling with elation. His heavy spectacles were awry, and his withered skin, beneath the garish atomic lights, was filmed with bright sweat. His threadbare tunic was torn open at the throat. With a feverish wildness, he set down the last play and tapped the calculator and pushed out another bet.
Giles Habibula had stopped, panting apprehensively, in the circle of tense onlookers.
But his three companions pushed forward to the table, and the little gambler peered up at them.
His near-sighted eyes bunked in recognition.
“Thank you, Mr. Hannas,” his thin voice piped. “My system has won me twenty million dollars—a fair return, I think, for all my bitter years of washing dishes and living on nothing and saving pennies for your tables. And now I’m going to surprise you.”
With a nervous, greedy, haste, he raked in his winnings.
“You used to laugh at me, Mr. Hannas, when I came to ask some small favor.”
Resentment flashed hi his hollowed eyes. “You used to say that I was habitual, and you said habituals couldn’t quit. But I’m going to take my money home.” His shrill voice quivered, in pathetic defiance. “Good-bye, Mr. Hannas!”
He asked the croupier for an empty money-bag. His hurried hands began stuffing it with his winnings. Blue chips, and the glittering disks of synthetic diamond worth ten tunes as much. The gold-colored New Moon scrip. Crisp Green Hall certificates.
Jay Kalam snatched a glance at his chronometer, and made an imperative gesture to the alert Legionnaires about him.
“Five seconds!” he whispered. “Guard this man.”
Little Abel Davian picked up the bag of his winnings and his calculator and his little black book, and shuffled wearily away from the table. He paused to make a jerky, nervous little gesture of farewell.
“No, Mr. Hannas,” he muttered. “I’m not coming back—”
Jay Kalam stiffened where he stood, and caught his breath.
His ears heard a most peculiar noise: a deep vibrant hum. It was like the purr of a monstrous jungle cat in its suggestion of ominous and ruthless power, yet mechanical in its even rhythm.
And it had an uncanny penetration—it throbbed through all his body; it made his bones ache and his head throb and his teeth chatter.
Abel Davian—flickered! Exactly, the Commander thought, as if some perfectly transparent curtain had dropped between them. And his thin, stooped little body seemed for an instant queerly frozen, like a motion picture when the projector stops.
Then Abel Davian was gone.
Even in that stunned and breathless instant, Jay Kalam was aware of the crackle of discharged electricity, of the tingling of his skin. He knew that a sudden force pushed him violently toward the spot where Abel Davian had been, instantly tugged him as violently back.
And then, still swaying and sick to his heart with a cold nausea of fear, Jay Kalam ran his hand before staring, utterly unbelieving eyes. For there beside the table, in the exact spot from which the little man had been so strangely snatched away, was something else! Something—monstrous!
9
The Thing from Nowhere
Chan Derron, when the blond girl greeted him by name at the Casino’s resplendent entrance, stood for an instant shocked and cold. Then, looking into her shining violet eyes, he let himself respond a little to her smile, and returned the warm pressure of her hand.
“Can we talk for a moment?” he asked, and nodded aside from the busy portal.
“But come with me, inside.” Her voice was a golden song that rang in his heart. “I’ve a table reserved for us in the grille beside the Diamond Room. We can talk as we dine. And then—”
The music of her voice missed a note, and through the violet depths of her eyes flashed something black and cold as transgalactic space.
“Then,” she said softly, and once more the radiance of her smile set a pain to throbbing in his heart, “we shall play.”
“Wait, please!” Chan Derron caught his breath, and tried to quiet the wild pulse hammering in his ears. He made his eyes look for a moment away from the girl’s disturbing beauty, while he mastered his face and his voice. He turned back to her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Very sorry—because you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
But I think you have mistaken my identity. I am Dr. Charles Derrel. Here from Venus, en route back to Earth. I’m sorry, but we’ve never met before. And I don’t know this —did you say—Chan Derron?”
Her fine, proud head shook slightly, and her lustrous platinum hair shimmered in the changing light from the immense, jewel-like columns of the Casino. There was something subtly mocking in her violet eyes, and Chan noticed for the first time that they were very slightly tilted.
“I could not mistake your identity,” she said softly. “And if you don’t know Chan Derron, I’ll refresh your memory.”
Her slim quick hands opened a white bag, and allowed him a brief but sufficient glimpse of his own features, beneath the screaming type that offered a quarter of a million dollars in reward.
The bag snapped shut, and her white smile dazzled him.
“Now, Charles,” she asked, “shall we dine?”
Something hi the way she spoke, something far beyond the light, inviting music of her voice, was hard as the great white jewel at her throat, cold as a planet whose sun is dead. Chan Derron tried to conceal the tiny shudder that ran through his big body.
“Whatever you say, my dear,” he told her.
Inside the massive, gold-rimmed portal, they had to show their reservation checks.
Chan glimpsed the girl’s. The name on it was Vanya Eloyan. Residence, Juno. But it was a yellow temporary check, like his own.
In the dining room, which occupied a triangular space between two of the radiating halls, Chan seated the girl at a secluded, fern-hidden table. She declined champagne, and so, cautiously, did he.
“Vanya Eloyan,” he said softly, relishing the name. “Of Juno.” He looked up at her white, dynamic loveliness. “But I think you are a girl of Earth, Vanya. I’ve never met a colonial with quite your manner, though your accent does suggest that you were educated at the Martian universities. In science, I should say. And music. Am I right?”
The white perfection of her face was fixed, suddenly, with a solemnity of purpose almost tragic, though still the sheer beauty of it kept an ache in Chan’s throat.
“I prefer not to speak of myself.” Her voice, for all its music, was cold as the sun of Neptune. “I came to meet you here, Chan Derron, to ask you a question.” She leaned a little forward, her splendid figure tense; her violet eyes lit with a fire bright and terrible. “
What did you do with Dr. Eleroid’s invention ?”
All the blood ran out of Chan Derron’s face, leaving it the ghastly gray-white of the pigment he had used. A cold blade cleft his heart. Icy, strangling hands stopped his breath. The strength ebbed out of him. His big body sagged toward the table.
In the prison on Ebron he had heard that question ten thousand times, until the very syllables brought back those years of torture. He had been fighting for two years to escape it. It was a little time before the dryness of his throat would let him speak, and then he said: “I didn’t kill Dr. Eleroid. I didn’t take his invention. My conviction was unjust. I’ve been the victim o
f something—monstrous! Believe me, Vanya—”
Her eyes glinted with the chill of a polar dusk.
“I don’t believe you, Chan Derron.” Her low voice rang with a deadly resolution.
“And you won’t escape until I know what you have done—what you are doing—with Dr. Eleroid’s secret.”
The desperate, ruthless intensity of her ready poise and her searching face made her seem to Chan the most terrible but yet the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. And suddenly he was startled by some mocking familiarity.
“Remember, Chan Derron,” her cold voice warned him, “with two words I can end your life tonight—and the amazing career of the Basilisk!”
Chan Derron drew a long uneven breath, and settled slowly back in his chair. He was staring at the figure of white loveliness across the table. He stared while a silent waiter brought their food, and silently departed. And the thing he saw was more alarming than her icy threat.
For the make-up on her perfect face had dissolved and shifted. Her violet eyes in his mind, had turned a clear ice-green. The platinum splendor of her hair had become a glory of red-lit mahogany. Yes, indeed, he knew her face!
He had studied every feature of it, for lonely hours, on the picture posted beside his own on the bulkhead of the Phantom Atom . This splendid and deadly being was no woman! She was Luroa, the last survivor of Eldo Arrynu’s synthetic android monsters. The price on her life matched that on his own.
Chan Derron smiled gently, and eased the dark glasses on his face.
“You know two words,” he whispered softly. “But I know one—Luroa.”
There was a flicker of white tension on her face, he thought. The flash of something dark and deadly in the deep pools of her eyes. But in another instant she was smiling at him radiantly.
“The food, Dr. Charles,” she said, “is too good to be neglected—and we must be in the Diamond Room before midnight.”
When they were in the gaming room, the girl bought a stack of chips—displaying a sheaf of green certificates that seemed to speak of the sinister skills of Luroa. They played, he placing the chips at her direction. And they won. Perhaps, Chan thought—he had few illusions about the role of chance at the New Moon’s tables—because the magnet of her beauty always crowded the table where she played.
Her violet eyes were watching him very closely, he could tell, and seeing all that happened about them, and measuring the minutes that fled. She was waiting, he realized, for midnight—and for him to betray himself as the Basilisk.
“Vanya,” he whispered once, when they had a moment alone, “I only came here to hunt this criminal. If you’ll let me—”
“Wait,” she returned inexorably, “until midnight.”
When the three Legionnaires came upon them, Chan Derron recognized the Commander and Hal Samdu at once. Even in plain clothes, they were unmistakable to any veteran of the Legion. For a little time he put hope in his disguise—fervidly regretting that he had not been six inches shorter.
The return of his check and keys, however, by Jay Kalam, convinced him that he had been identified—and that the short fat man’s spectacular maneuvers had been no more than an elaborate accompaniment to the picking of his pocket.
It surprised Mm that the girl spoke so promptly in Ms defense. His sense of her surpassing beauty kept rising above Ms fear of her—even above his cold instinctive horror of the android.
When the Commander had gone, he turned to her with a little smile of relief, and gratitude.
“Thank you, Vanya.”
Her smile of response was breath-taking—but all intended, he swiftly realized, for the spectators. For her golden voice dropped softer than a whisper; pitilessly cold, it rang ominously in Ms ear: “No thanks are due me, Chan Derron. Kalam and Samdu and old Habibula know you as well as I do—and my identification meant nothing to them. They are just waiting—as I am—for midnight.”
And midnight came.
The girl, as the moment stalked upon them, had gripped Chan’s arm. Her small fingers sank desperately into Ms flesh—as strong, he thought, as an android’s must be. And her keen violet eyes were watching every move he made, he knew, as sharply as he watched the promised victim of the Basilisk—gray, tattered, trembling little Abel Davian.
Her other hand, he noticed, and wondered at it, was toying constantly with the great white jewel at her throat. What manner of jewel, he was asking himself in that final moment, was this huge gem that had the prismatic sheen and the intricate hexagonal perfection of a great snowflake?
Chan Derron heard that Hideous, feral purring. He saw little Davian flicker, grow queerly rigid—and saw that he was gone. He felt a breath of dank and ice-cold air. He was flung toward the spot where Davian had been, and dragged instantly back.
Then—hardly aware that he was strangling to a whiff of some choking, acrid gas—he was staring with bewildered and incredulous eyes at the monstrous thing that had appeared in Davian’s place. It was like nothing men had found in all the System.
Standing on three thin, swaying, rubbery-looking legs, it reared twelve feet Mgh.
Queerly teardrop-shaped, its body was covered with close-set, green-black scales.
Three huge eyes, of a dull and lurid crimson, glared from its armored head. Its enormous, jet-black beak yawned open to reveal multiple rows of saber-like teeth. An unpleasant fringe of long green serpentine tentacles hung beneath the beak.
A greenish slime was dripping from that fearful body to the polished floor, exactly, Chan thought, as if the creature had just that instant been snatched out of the muck of some primordial jungle. Beneath the slime, its dark scales had an odd, metallic glint.
And there was that strangling, pungent reek, which Chan slowly recognized as the odor of chlorine.
For a little time it stood almost motionless, twisting that frightful, long-beaked head, so that those three enormous red eyes, which looked in three separate directions, could survey all the circle of puny humans about it.
A queer strained hush had fallen on the Diamond Room. For a moment there was not even a scream. Then those nearer, choked and blinded with the breath of chlorine that had come with the creature, began to stumble uncertainly back. The first sound was a hysterical laugh, that became a thin sobbing scream. And then the hush became an insane stampede.
But already the thing had moved. Three wings were abruptly extended from its armored back.
Queerly, they unrolled . They were translucently green, and delicately ribbed with darker emerald. One on each side and the third, tail-like, behind, they raised and fell, one by one, experimentally, and then became a blur of motion.
Out of that fearful beak came an appalling bellow. Reverberating against the lofty vault of the Diamond Room, a wild echo out of unknown jungles, it hastened the fugitive thousands. And the creature itself, with an ungainly but amazing swiftness, ran forward on the three swaying limbs. Its wings made a mounting thunder of sound, and the wind rushing from them was choking with chlorine.
“Back, Vanya!” gasped Chan.
Chan sprang after her. But the great wing struck his head and crushed him down.
Falling, he glimpsed the girl standing in the monster’s path. Both her hands, he saw, were lifted to her strange white pendant.
Then the green tentacles, squirming snake-like beneath that beak, snatched her up.
The thing lifted with her above the expanding ring of panic-stricken fugitives, and flew with her swiftly down the hall.
“Get him!” It was the great voice of Hal Samdu, roaring vainly against the shrieking tumult.
“Get Chan Derron!”
Blind and coughing from the chlorine, the giant was staggering about, blinking his eyes, waving a long, bright blaster. Jay Kalam, beside him, strangled and voiceless, was trying to call to the plain-clothes men. *
“Aye, get him!” wheezed Giles Habibula from beneath a table. “And get the mortal monster!”
“Half a million!” Caspar Hannas bellow
ed. “To the man who gets Chan Derron!”
Stunned dismay and poison gas, Chan realized, had given him a few free seconds.
And, strapped to his body beneath the green cloak, he had the compact geopellor unit from his spare space suit. The control cable ran down his sleeve, and his fingers gripped the handle. A swift pressure on it—and he rose silently from the midst of his enemies. Flying high beneath the vault of the Diamond Room, he soared after the monster and the girl.
White, silent proton bolts stabbed after him. Plaster exploded from the painted vault, raining down into the panic on the floor. He breathed the sharpness of ozone, and felt one faint shock.
But the geopellor, for all its compactness, was swift. Chan pursued a darting zigzag.
Seconds, only, had gone, when he came to the end of the long Diamond Room. But the monster, with the girl, had already vanished.
The trail they had left was plain. The alien creature must have overlooked the wide doorway, for a ragged opening yawned in the top of the vault. Chan twisted the spindle in his hand. The geopellor flung him up through it.
And his brain, refreshed by the rushing wind of his flight, reached a swift decision.
This moment—when he was free and in the air, while the monster was creating a diversion—this was obviously his chance to escape. And dread impelled him to flight, for the girl’s accusation and the encounter with Jay Kalam had brought back all the horror of the Devil’s Rock.
But he hadn’t come to escape. He was hunting the Basilisk, and the monster was the one visible clue to the identity and the methods of that criminal. A shudder tensed his straight-extended flying body. But he knew that he must follow the monster.
The girl herself, he tried to tell himself, didn’t matter. The pitiless synthetic brain of Luroa was a greater danger to him than all the Legion. It would be better if the monster destroyed her. Yet, hi spite of himself, the thought of Vanya Eloyan spurred his frantic haste.
One Against the Legion Page 7