Jay Kalam held up a lean hand.
“One question, Hal. Why should the robot have been copied after such an original?”
“The scientists discussed that, Jay. Besides any possible intention to deceive other creatures of that world, or to mislead and terrify the people of this—”
The rugged brow of the Admiral-General furrowed with a frown of concentrated effort.
“Besides that, Jay, there is the general speculation that machines designed to operate efficiently, under any given set of conditions, must frequently follow the same principles that life has found most efficient under those conditions—the very words of the report! Why don’t you just read it, Jay?”
But the Commander motioned silently for him to go on.
“From the dimensions of the thing, and the amount of power provided for the functioning of its limbs and wings,” Hal Samdu resumed laboriously, “particularly from the size, strength, weight and camber of the wings themselves, in relation to the total weight—from all that, the scientists arrived at fairly precise data on the atmospheric density and surface gravity.
“From a study of the cooling system, insulation, and lubricants used—all checked against the optimum temperature conditions for those chlorine-loving micro-organisms—they closely estimated the temperature of the planet.
“The photo-cells that served as eyes for the thing revealed a good deal. From their sensitivity, the adjustment of their iris diaphragms, and the nature of the color filters used, it was possible to determine very exactly the intensity and the color of light to which they were adapted—the light of a K9e sun, within a certain range of distances.
“One deduction checked against another, to verify and refine the first approximations.
I’ve been able to give you but a clumsy sketch of it, Jay. Aye, the science of the System has become a fine and powerful instrument!”
“Too powerful,” Jay Kalam said, “in the hands of the Basilisk! But what else, Hal?
Anything on how the robot arrived in the New Moon—and how Davian was taken away?”
Hal Samdu shook his shaggy white head.
“There was no real evidence, Jay, but one of the geodesic physicists has a theory. He thinks the Basilisk must be using some application of the same achronic forces the visiwave does—the same sort of warp in the geodesic lines that brought Kay Nymidee out of the comet. You’ll find his whole report in the envelope, but he admits that his idea is too vague to be of any practical use. With our data from the cometary expedition, we might have worked out something —but that’s gone.”
“Then,” Jay Kalam demanded, “have you anything on the location of this star?”
“It’s in the envelope, Jay,” Hal Samdu continued desperately. “The astrophysicists did another remarkable piece of work. They listed all the K9e stars hi telescopic range—they are not very luminous, you know, with a surface temperature just above three thousand, and therefore the number known is relatively small.
“They checked off nearly half which are binaries, and hence could have no planets.
Most of the rest were eliminated because spectro-graphic studies revealed no trace whatever of absorption by free atmospheric chlorine. When they were done, Jay, only one star was left.”
The Commander rose abruptly. “What star is that?”
“They showed it to me in the telescope—and showed me the faint dark lines of free chlorine in the spectrograms. It’s a faint red star in the constellation Draco, known as Ulnar XIV. Its distance is eighty light-years.”
“Eighty light-years!” Jay Kalam’s thin lips pursed. “No man has been so far—none except the Basilisk! It would take us two years to reach it, at the full power of the Inflexible —and we should arrive without any fuel left for action or return.”
His dark head shook slowly. Thin, unconscious fingers combed the one white lock back from his forehead. His dark eyes stared at Hal Samdu, with a fixed intensity.
“Hal—” he whispered suddenly, hoarsely. “Hal—I see but one thing to do. It’s a terrible thing—it is terrible for life, the child of a star, to destroy a star. And we’ve no certainty that even that would end the Basilisk—we may have spun our assumptions out too far.”
He caught his breath, as if with an effort.
“However, I’m going to order the destruction of the star Ulnar XIV.” His dark eyes closed for a moment, as if against some dreadful sight. “Another time, I waited too long—to urge the keeper to annihilate the green comet. Great as a star may be, the life of the System matters somewhat more to us.”
“Aye,” Hal Samdu rumbled solemnly. “Strike!”
The Commander of the Legion found the small black disk of his communicator. His thin, trembling fingers turned the tiny dials, and tapped out a code signal. His thin lips whispered into it. Hal Samdu sat watching, his face rigid as a statue’s.
At last Jay Kalam lowered the instrument.
“It is unfortunate that no visiwave equipment has yet been installed on Phobos,” he said. “I am communicating direct, by ultra-wave. But Mars is now more than a hundred million miles away.
It will take nine minutes for the message to reach the keeper. In ten, the star Ulnar XIV should have ceased to exist in the material universe—although terrestrial astronomers will naturally not be able to detect its disappearance for another eighty years!”
He paced a nervous turn across the end of the big silent room, beyond the desk.
“Twenty minutes,” he muttered. “Before we can get any reply—”
“What was that?”
Hal Samdu was suddenly peering about the empty room, blaster level in his big gnarled hand.
“Didn’t you hear it, Jay?” he demanded. “A muffled purr! Or feel a breath of bitter cold?”
“I heard nothing, Hal.” Jay Kalam sighed, wearily. “We’ve been under too much strain. I’ll order you something to drink. And look through the report, while we’re waiting.”
He broke the seal on the big green envelope.
“Eh!” His jaw fell slack. “This is no report.”
“But it is, Jay! It hasn’t been out of my sight.”
Out upon the desk the Commander poured a score of neatly tied packets of little yellow slips.
“These are I O U’s!” he gasped. “Payable to the New Moon Syndicate. They must have come from the vaults of Caspar Hannas! And here—here—”
His trembling fingers had found a familiar sheet of stiff crimson parchment. It bore the serpentine monogram. Upon it, hi that precise familiar script, was written: My dear Commander: Admiral-General Samdu’s brilliant summary has given you a sufficient idea of the genuinely brilliant work of his investigators, and I believe that circumstances will very shortly prove the document to be no longer of value to you.
The Basilisk “Derron!” Waving the blaster, Hal Samdu was peering wildly about the great armored room.
“We can’t escape bun—not even here! If Giles doesn’t get him—”
Jay Kalam was still staring at the red sheet, with dull lifeless eyes, when: Krrr! Krrr! Krrr! shrilled the tiny, piercing emergency call from his communicator.
With stiff fingers he groped again for the little black disk, set the dial, and held it to his ear.
Hal Samdu, watching, saw his face grow taut and white. The instrument at last dropped out of his fingers, and he swayed over the desk, holding himself up with trembling arms.
“It wasn’t the reply,” Hal Samdu was rasping hoarsely. “There hasn’t been time!
What has happened, Jay?”
The lustreless, glazing eyes of Jay Kalam stared at him.
“The worst, Hal,” he whispered. “That was a frightened bodyguard calling from Phobos—the call crossed ours. The Basilisk has struck again. This time he has taken them all.
John Star. And Bob’s wife and her child. And—”
He made a little shrug of hopeless defeat.
“And—the keeper of the peace!”
12
&
nbsp; The Plundered Vault
That mighty, feral purr receded. The icy cold was gone. Chan Derron could breathe again.
Swaying unsteadily, still on his feet, he tried to see where he was, but a smothering darkness wrapped him. His heart was hammering. His breath was a rapid gasping. Cold goose pimples still roughened his body. He had been snatched from before the menacing weapon of Vanya Eloyan, he knew, by that uncanny agency of the Basilisk—and his very vanishing, the girl would take for absolute proof that he was himself the criminal!
But now—where was he ?
In some confined black space. His feet scraped on a metal floor, and the swift ring of the sound told him that walls were near. He stumbled forward, and his hands came upon a barrier of cold metal.
Was this the Euthanasia Clinic—and the thought drove a cold blade of panic into him—where another victim of the Basilisk had been found murdered? Was death waiting for him, in this thick darkness, now? What was that ?
He crouched and spun. Intently he listened, but there was no sound beyond the prompt echo.
His eyes strained vainly into the blackness. His hand swept instinctively toward the holster under his cloak. And then he remembered, with a sinking sickness in his heart, that the girl had disarmed him.
Something brushed his shoulder. He put up a defensive arm, and something tapped it again. He tried to quiet a pounding heart, and groped before him. His cold fingers caught a swinging pendant. He pulled at it, and a blue-white glare of atomic light blinded him.
For a moment he had to cover his eyes. And then, staring about, he blinked again in wonder.
This was indeed a vault—just before him was the ponderous lock-mechanism of an armored door that must have weighed two hundred tons—but in no crematorium.
For the long shelves that lined the branching narrow corridors were stacked with the heavy bags and rolls and packets that held the symbols of wealth, all neatly sorted into chips and scrip and coin and currency. And every bag and roll and packet bore the yellow crescent that was the New Moon’s emblem. This, the dazed realization broke upon Chan, was the New Moon’s treasure vault!
Then he noticed a curious thing. The scrip of the New Moon Syndicate, the chips used at play, and the bags of coin were all apparently intact—but upon the shelves labeled to contain Green Hall certificates, there were only stacks of rough clay bricks.
The vault had been looted! What remained was almost worthless—all the real money was gone, with only mocking clay left in its place!
And his tall body went suddenly rigid and cold. For the vault would presently be opened—probably it had been locked, for safety, because of the Basilisk’s promised raid. When it was opened, the Legion of Space and the New Moon police would find the man they thought they wanted—cornered.
In the silence of the vault, Chan began to wonder if the man who had put him there still watched him. His strained nerves could feel alert and hostile eyes upon him.
Imagination pictured the Basilisk laughing at him—a low thick chuckle, he thought of it, cold, diabolical, inhumanly gloating.
“Well, Mr. Basilisk?” He couldn’t stop his own wild, ragged voice from talking into the mocking silence. “What am I to do now? Sit down and cry? Tear my nails out scratching at the wall? Hang myself from the shelves? Or just let them find me?”
It was hard to keep from screaming. He paced up and down the metal floor, driven with a savage, futile energy. Apprehension painted a vague sinister presence, leering from beyond the shelves.
“Well, can you hear me?” he choked. “How does it feel to be a god, Basilisk? To watch every man in the System? To follow all who try to escape your power, wherever they go? To take what you want? And slay whom you will?”
He shook his fist, against the bare metal wall.
“It may feel pretty great—to your twisted brain—whoever you are. But you won’t last forever!
For some poor devil will get you—somebody that you’ve mocked and tortured and battered until all that keeps him alive is a little voice that says kill him, kill him, kill him!
“Somebody, Basilisk, like me.”
Then it happened that his aimless pacing brought him to the scrap of paper on the floor and it happened that his wildly staring eyes glimpsed the scrawled symbols on it. With a wondering exclamation, he snatched it up, smoothed it with his fingers, studied it anxiously.
A small oblong sheet, torn across one end. Scratched upon it, in hasty pencil marks, were three heliocentric space-time positions, followed by a series of numbers in which Chan could see neither relation nor meaning.
The first position designated was that of the New Moon, he recognized—the position it had occupied at the moment of that midnight on which the Basilisk had taken the little gambler, Davian.
The second position—and the thing that had first caught Chan’s eye—was a point located in the constellation Draco, at a distance of some ten billions of miles from the Sun. That was the location of the unknown object Chan had discovered when he fled northward from the Legion fleet, the object to which he had been planning to escape when the pursuit of the Basilisk drove him to turn and fight.
The third position was also in the Dragon—but at a heliocentric elevation which Chan quickly interpreted into the amazing distance of eighty light-years.
After a few moments of study, Chan Derron slipped the crumpled scrap very hastily into the pocket of his tunic, and fervently hoped that the Basilisk wasn’t looking—after all, he told himself, a presumably human brain must be limited in its power of attention.
The millions of tons of that object in space had been an utter mystery. This bit of paper seemed good evidence that it was connected with the operations of the Basilisk.
And the discovery opened the faintest possible chance—His fists were clenched.
“If I can get out,” he muttered, “out of here and out of the New Moon and back to the Phantom Atom —if she’s still safe where I left her—if I can get aboard her, and escape the Legion fleet, and get out to that object—”
His voice fell to a soundless whisper.
“If I can do all that, Mr. Basilisk—look out!”
Great shoulders square again, he strode to the lock. Its bolts and levers were uncovered for him to see—bright metal bars weighing many tons. But they were yet secure. His desperate strength and frantic eyes could discover no way to move them.
“If Giles Habibula were here—” he muttered.
Wistfully he recalled the fabulous exploits of the old Legionnaire in picking the locks of the Medusae and opening the guarded vaults of the Cometeers. Habibula, doubtless, with all this mechanism open before him, could have opened the door at once.
But Chan Derron was completely baffled.
He was standing back, panting, sweat-drenched from useless effort —when something clicked, concealed motors hummed, and the great bolts began to slide slowly back as if of their own accord.
It would be the men of Caspar Hannas, of course, opening the vault. Chan Derron’s hand flashed automatically to his armpit, to find only the empty holster of his blaster and the straps that still held the compact unit of the geopellor to his body.
Weaponless, he could only wait, watching the appallingly deliberate well-oiled movement of the bolts. In the geopellor, ironically, lay power to carry him across a hundred million miles of space, but it was useless now. At last the bolts were withdrawn, and the ponderous disk of the door swung slowly open.
“Hasten, you fools!” a great harsh voice was booming. “I must see if all is safe.” That must be Caspar Hannas himself, driven wild with a well-founded fear for his treasure.
“If the Basilisk can do all the things he has done, these locks are worthless.”
“And there he is!” It was a triumphant shout, from a half-glimpsed man in the yellow of the New Moon’s police. “Trapped!”
The violet, blinding tongue of a proton jet whipped through the widening opening.
And the voice of Caspar Hann
as bellowed: “Forward, men! We’ve got him! He’s worth half a million—remember—dead or alive! And the woman—if she’s with him—half a million more!”
Chan Derron had stepped swiftly aside, at the first flash of the ray. He waited, listening. There must be a score of men without, he knew from the little sounds of feet and breath and weapons, and they were alertly advancing. He snatched the swinging cord and snapped off the lights in the vault.
“Come out, Basilisk!” boomed the tremendous voice of Caspar Hannas. “With empty hands! Or we’ll come in and get you!”
Crouching in the darkness, Chan called a desperate last appeal: “I’m not the Basilisk, Hannas.” His voice stuck and quivered. “I’m Chan Derron.
More a victim than anyone. If you’ll listen to me, Hannas—”
“Forward, men!” thundered Hannas. “He admits he’s Derron, and we’ve caught him in the vault! Burn him up!”
The door was swinging wider. Out of the darkness, Chan watched the men creeping forward.
Narrowed eyes fearfully searching, proton guns uneasily ready.
He gulped and tried to still the shuddering dread in him.
“You are afraid of me,” he called. “Every one of you. I can see the sweat of fear on all your faces. I can see fear crawling in your eyes. Well, you had better be afraid. But it is the Basilisk you ought to fear, and not the man his monstrous tricks have loaded down with suspicion. I, too, am hunting the Basilisk. And now I have some information. I can help you—”
The great voice of Hannas cut him off: “You’ve got too much information, Derron! But it is going to die with you.
Get him, men!”
And the men in yellow slipped forward again.
Chan Derron caught his breath, and snatched one of the mocking clay bricks off the racks. And his fingers gripped the little black control spindle of the geopellor, at the end of the cable that ran down his sleeve.
One Against the Legion Page 10