“If you can!” he shouted. “But you won’t get your treasure, Mr. Hannas! Your vault is stripped clean. Here’s what the Basilisk left!”
He flung the little brick, so that it shattered against the face of the door. Fragments pelted the men beyond. Half a dozen blinding jets leapt, as nervous ringers contracted. One man, sobbing an oath of fear, dropped his weapon and ran—until an officer’s swift beam cut him down.
“Empty?” came the stricken voice of Hannas. “Empty—”
This was the moment. Chan filled his lungs with breath—for the speed of the geopellor made breathing almost impossible. He squeezed and twisted the control handle. And the compact little unit on his shoulders lifted him. It flung him toward the wall of guns.
Bright proton guns flung up to stop him, but their deadly violet lances stabbed behind him. He was already driving bullet-like down one of the long corridors beneath the gaming halls.
“After him, you cowards—”
The great roaring voice of Caspar Hannas was whisked away, upon the shrieking wind. But the rays could overtake him. Thin lines of fire cut straight to the armored wall ahead. One hissed very near, and ionized air brought Chan a stunning shock.
Teeth gritted, fighting the darkness in his reeling brain, he twisted the little spindle back and forth. The geopellor flung him from side to side, in a swift zigzag, with a savage straining force.
Greater danger awaited him at the long hall’s end. Once he stopped to seek an exit, he would make a fair target for the men behind—and the first bull’s-eye worth half a million dollars.
He bent his twisting flight toward the floor, and blinked his streaming, wind-blinded eyes. And he saw a small door swing open ahead. A huge man in white filled it completely, carrying a bag of potatoes.
Chan checked his velocity a little—but perilously little—and aimed his bullet flight for the fat cook’s burden. He saw the man’s eyes begin to stare and widen, and he set his own body for the impact.
The geodesic field shielded him somewhat, but it was still a dazing blow. The cook was hurled flat in the doorway. And Chan, beyond him, came into a kitchen bigger than he had ever dreamed of. Acres of stoves; endless white conveyor tables loaded with dishes and food. All but deserted, now, for the New Moon was being emptied, by fear of the Basilisk.
Beyond the kitchen, in the narrow quarters of the servants, he realized that he had lost his direction. Behind him was a tumult of fear and menace. Half those who glimpsed his flight screamed and fled or hid. But another half, made daring by the magic promise of that half-million, shouted to the pursuers behind, or snatched at weapons of their own.
But the geopellor was swifter than all the hue and cry. Chan dropped upon his feet, walked breathless around the turn of a corridor, and met a yellow-capped porter hastening with a bag.
“Which way,” he gasped, “to the docks?”
“That way, sir.” The man pointed. “To your left, beyond the pools. But I’m afraid, sir, you’ll find the ships all booked—”
His mouth fell open as Chan lifted into the air and soared over his head.
“The Basilisk!” he began to scream. “This way! To the docks!”
The pursuit followed his voice. But Chan’s plunging flight had already carried him into the “hanging pools” that were one of the New Moon’s novel attractions—great spheres of water, each held aloft by a gravity-plate core of its own, each illuminated with colored light that turned it to a globe of changing fire.
The swimmers had fled. Chan threaded a swift way among the spheres. He heard an alarm siren moaning behind him. And suddenly the gravity-circuits must have been cut off, for the shimmering spheres of water turned to plunging falls.
Already, however, the geopellor had flung him over the rail of a high balcony. He burst through a door beyond, and came into the vast space at the docks. The immense floor was crowded, now, with gay-clad thousands, swept into panic by fear of the Basilisk, fighting for a place on the out-bound ships.
Leaning for a moment against the balcony door, Chan caught his breath. He must have a space suit. There were space suits in the locker rooms beyond this frightened crowd, beside the great valve where he had entered the New Moon. He could fly across the mob, he thought, in seconds and with little risk. But sight of him flying would surely turn fear to stark panic. Many would doubtless be trampled and maimed.
After a second, he went down the steps on foot, and pressed into the fighting throng.
That was the longer way. It meant the danger that the valve-crew would be warned against him.
Yet he could not take the other way.
It took him endless minutes to push through fringes of the crowd. He heard the distant sob of sirens, and the thunder of annunciators beating against the voice of the mob.
He knew the hunt was spreading, and was uneasily aware of his head towering above all those about him.
But he came at last to the little door marked Employees Only , and slipped through it into the locker rooms. Here was less confusion than he found anywhere—the workers in the great sign were used to danger. He hurried to the locker where he had left his armor, stripped off his borrowed clothing, flung himself into the space suit, and strode toward the great air lock.
The inner valve was open. A crew of silver-armored technicians were just marching out. Chan entered, as the last of them came through, and made an urgent gesture to the man at the controls. That man had already stiffened, however, listening.
“Warning!” a magnetic speaker was crackling. “Close all locks—until Derron is caught. This man is now attempting to escape from the New Moon. There is a half million reward for him, dead or alive. Derron is six feet three, believed—”
Chan saw quick suspicion change to deadly certainty in the eyes of the valve-keeper.
He heard the beginning of a shout and caught the glint of weapons. But the geopellor was already lifting him toward the lock. His bright-clad fist shattered the glass over the emergency lever—intended to be used only if the great valve was closing on a man’s body. He pulled down the lever.
The gate before him flung open, as the one behind automatically clanged shut in the face of pursuit. A blast of air spewed him out. The geopellor stopped his spinning flight, and brought him up to the platform where he had landed. He found the wire marked Sector 17-B, snapped the belt of his suit to it, and squeezed the little spindle.
The geopellor flung him out along the wire.
Five hundred miles to go. The great sign spread its web about him, silver wires shining bright against the dark of space. Great mirrors flashed against the sun; filters glowed red and blue and green. He glimpsed the gibbous Earth, huge and mistily brilliant, so near that he felt he could almost touch the ragged white patch that was a cyclonic storm over Europe.
Five hundred miles—but he pushed the geopellor to a reckless pace, for a warning must be flashing out, he knew, over the wires about him. In four minutes—no more—he had released himself from the pilot wire, beside the silver ball of the control house.
His searching eyes found the Phantom Atom . The tiny ship was safe, still hidden behind the great foil mirror. The geopellor carried him to its valve and he flung himself inside.
The first intimation of disaster came when he saw that the prisoner he had left there, space armor welded to the housing, was gone. His heart stood still. Was this some new trick of the Basilisk?
He opened the inner valve, and came face to face with a man waiting for him in the corridor.
A very short fat man, with protruding middle and bald spherical head and wrinkled yellow skin.
The same man—no mistaking him! —whom Jay Kalam had sent to pick his pockets in the Diamond Room. The intruder was blinking ominously, with pale small eyes. His fat hands held a thick cane pointing at Chan’s body—and a deadly little black orifice was visible in the ferrule that tipped it.
“Come on in, Mr. Basilisk!” he wheezed triumphantly. “And match your mortal wits against Gile
s Habibula!”
13
The Hundredth Man
Hope came to the Legion with the first ultrawave message from Giles Habibula.
Uncharacteristically laconic, it ran: Aboard Derron’s ship. Bound for mysterious object near Thuban in Draco. For life’s sake, follow! And the Legion followed. Jay Kalam put the mighty Inflexible at the head of Hal Samdu’s fleet of ten geodesic cruisers. At full power they reached northward, toward Alpha Draconis—which once had been the pole star of Earth. Toward what destination?
Every officer in the fleet was trying to answer that question. Every electronic telescope and mass detector was driven to the utmost of its power searching for any mysterious object. By the time they were one day out from the New Moon, part of the answer had been discovered.
Jay Kalam, tired and pale from the long strain of the chase, restlessly pacing the deep-piled rugs of his sound-proofed and ray-armored chambers in the heart of the Inflexible , paused at the signal from his communicator, and lifted the little black disk to his ear.
“We’ve found it, Commander!” came an excited voice from the bridge. “Forty-four minutes of arc from Alpha Draconis. It’s still invisible—albedo must be very low. But the mass detectors indicate an object of nearly twenty million tons.
“A puzzling thing, Commander. This object, whatever it is, must be a newcomer to the System.
We estimate the distance from the sun at a little less than ten billion miles. Any object of that size would surely have been discovered by the Legion’s survey expedition, five years ago—if it had been there then!”
Jay Kalam put the communicator to his lips.
“Can you identify the object?”
“Not yet,” came the reply. “Until we can pick it up on the screens, we won’t know whether it’s just a rock—or something else.”
“Keep tele-periscopes focused on the spot,” Jay Kalam ordered. “And use every instrument to search space ahead of us, until we pick up Derron’s ship. Keep communications standing by for another message from Giles Habibula, and the vortex gun ready for action.”
Shift and changing shift, the gun crew stood ready about the ponderous weapon. In every observatory on every racing ship, men searched the dark void amid the stars of the Dragon ahead. And the communications men waited for further word from Giles Habibula.
But the weary Commander of the Legion, sleeplessly pacing the silent empty luxury of his apartments upon the flagship, restlessly combing his white forelock back with anxious thin hands, received other messages. They came by visiwave from the System behind—for the hard-driven fleet was already beyond the range of ultrawave communication. Their import was all of alarm.
The first message came from the captain in charge of the plain-clothes men who had been detailed to shadow the three suspects on the New Moon—Amo Brelekko and John Comaine and Gaspar Hannas. All three had vanished.
“John Comaine mysteriously disappeared from his laboratory, with two of our men on duty outside the only door,” the report stated. “Gaspar Hannas had locked himself in his empty treasure vault. His scream for aid was heard by communicator. When associates opened the vault, he was gone. Amo Brelekko was removed from the floor of the Diamond Room, as the little gambler Davian had been—and in his place, before the few appalled spectators left on the New Moon to see it, was dropped a decaying human skeleton which has been identified as that of a female android.”
That made little sense to Jay Kalam. He pondered the implications of it, and then dispatched a message to the captain, asking for further information. The reply, relayed from Rocky Mountain Base, informed him that this officer had now also vanished.
Km! Krrr! Krrr!
The penetrating beat of his emergency signal announced the next message, and he heard the ragged voice of a distraught Legion Intelligence officer reading a note from Lars Eccard, Chairman of the Green Hall Council. All sixty members of the Council had been threatened with abduction, by the Basilisk. No ransom was demanded, and no escape was offered—“Chairman Eccard’s dictation was interrupted at that point,” the shaken voice continued. “Staff members rushed into his chambers and found him gone. Reliable reports from subordinate officers already confirm rumors that every member of the Council has disappeared.”
The whole Green Hall—kidnapped! Staggered by that blow, Jay Kalam slumped heavily behind his desk. Those sixty men and women had formed the supreme government of the System. The chosen representatives of the local planetary governments, of capital and labor, of the various professions and sciences—they had all been snatched away.
“Why?” The tired red eyes of the Commander stared across his great empty desk, at the black bunkhead. “Why take them?”
With an uncanny promptness that startled him, the beat of his emergency signal answered. What he heard, when he put the communicator to his ear, was a rasping whisper, distorted in transmission, “I’ll tell you why, Commander,” it mocked him. “I took them because I want the System to know my power. I want every man on every planet to shudder and grow pale when he thinks of the Basilisk. I want men to look on me as they once regarded angry gods.
“For I have suffered injuries that must be avenged.
“To establish my new supremacy, I am taking one hundred men and women from the System. They have been the leaders of the foolish attempt to destroy me, and therefore I can deal with them without compunction. I shall use them without remorse for the text of a lesson to mankind. One, out of the hundred, will be allowed to survive and return, to bring that lesson to the rest of mankind.”
An unpleasant chuckle rasped from the instrument.
“One hundred, Commander!” croaked that thin, mad voice. “You already know the most of them. Aladoree, the keeper of the peace. John Star. Bob Star, and his wife and their child. A few more of your most conspicuous Legionnaires. Two dozen private individuals —among them three men from the New Moon, Hannas and Comaine and Brelekko, The sixty members of the Green Hall Council —to let them consider all they have done to the Purples.”
The humming whisper gave way again to that sardonic chuckle, Jay Kalam’s hand tensed and trembled on the little black disk, and his aching body was cold with sudden sweat.
“The total now is ninety-nine,” that husky rasping ran on. “I need one more to complete my hundred. Knowing the other ninety-nine, Commander Kalam, I need not tell you who the other is to be.”
With that, the humming whisper ceased. Jay Kalam dropped the Communicator. His swift hand snatched the blaster from his belt; he spun to search the empty room—knowing all the time that such precautions were futile.
Nothing happened, however, in the long moment that he held his breath. He made himself holster the weapon again, and groped for the communicator to call Rocky Mountain Base, now a billion miles behind and more, through the visiwave relay.
“Did you pick up that message?” he asked hoarsely. “Is triangula-tion possible?”
And back across that void, that light would have taken many hours to bridge, the voice of the operator came instantly, consternation not hidden by its humming distortion.
“We heard it, Commander. But triangulation was impossible—because the message was transmitted from our own station! We haven’t yet discovered how our transmitter circuits picked it up. But guard yourself, Commander Kalam. You got the threat against yourself?”
“I did,” Jay Kalam said. “If I am kidnapped, Hal Samdu will take my place and the Legion will carry on.”
He dialed off, called Hal Samdu on the Bellatrix, and told that veteran spaceman of these disastrous new developments.
“Draw up beside the Inflexible , Hal,” he said, “and come aboard. You will take command if I become the hundredth man.”
“Aye, Jay.” The rumble of Hal Samdu came thinned and furred through the communicator. “But what of Giles—have you heard anything?”
“Not yet,” Jay Kalam told him.
“I’m afraid for Giles, Jay.” The deep voice seemed hoarse
with alarm. “It’s true he’s an old man, now, and not so clever as he used to be. This Derron is powerful and desperate—and it’s a whole day, now, since we heard anything.”
Jay Kalam lowered his communicator, with a helpless shrug—and instantly the throb of the emergency signal bade bun take it up again. He touched the dial, and put the little black disk to his ear.
“Jay! Do you hear me, Jay?” It was the long-awaited voice of Giles Habibula, thinned, muffled with the hum of the instrument, and hoarse with some desperate anxiety.
“I do, Giles,” he said into the little disk. “What is it?”
“Turn back, Jay,” came the faint, wheezing voice. “For life’s sake, turn your fleet back to the System. Call off your bloodhounds of space, and leave us be.”
“Turn back?” cried Jay Kalam. “Why?”
“Ah, Jay, there’s been a monstrous error. This is not the Basilisk I’ve caught. My companion is but an honest, luckless man. And your chase is a fearful blunder, Jay. It is drawing you far out into space, and leaving the System defenseless.
“In Earth’s name, Jay, I beg you to turn back.”
“Giles!” the Commander shouted. “If you’re speaking under torture—”
A dead click told him that the other instrument had been dialed off. He was trying to call back when the softer note of the ship’s signal rang. He heard the excited voice of the executive officer.
“We’ve got it, Commander! Derron’s ship. Dead ahead, toward that object in Draco.
Only forty tons—which is why it took us so long to pick it up. But it has power enough, apparently, to hold its lead. We have the range. What is your order?”
Jay Kalam’s hand tightened on the communicator. A cold wind seemed to blow around him, blowing away the ship, and blowing away the years. He saw Giles Habibula, a stout little man, strutting, grinning, as he had been when they were privates together.
He knew Habibula was on the ship ahead. But the rushing of that wind became the rusty whisper of the Basilisk, jeering at him. No man, not even a friend, could be weighed against his duty to the Legion.
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