Collected short fiction, p.330
Collected Short Fiction, page 330
The pale eyes blinked.
“Ah, so, dead—unless the blessed scientists come at the secret of rejuvenation. There’s a specialist, Jay, on this very New Moon, that promised—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 blessed kind to the aches in an old man’s bones. John Star is a generous host—not always rushing famished guests away from his fable, Jay!”
His thick yellow finger shook reprovingly.
“Ah, and it is a blessed comfort to see Aladoree every day—to see her so happy with John Star, Jay, after all the fearful dangers they have 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 blessed mite of happiness, Jay, to dandle Bob Star’s daughter on his knee. And to see the lass, Kay, so lovely, after all the horror of the comet, and so eager for Bob’s visits home.
“The next one, the doctors say, will be a son—and that’s a precious secret, Jay!”
Leaning heavily back in his chair, the old man sighed again.
“Old Giles was happy on Phobos, Jay—happy as the miserable, shattered old wreck of a dying legionnaire can be. Look at him. He has his bit of supper, amid the dear familiar faces. He savors his precious sip of wine. He dozes quietly away—ah, so, and it might have been into a poor old soldier’s well-earned last repose!
“And what happens?”
His pale eyes stared accusingly.
“He wakes up in a strange cramped bunk. And he finds he is upon a mortal 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 a mortal evil way to serve a defenseless old man, Jay, in his miserable sleep. The shock might stop his blessed 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 bloody Medusae. And that evil man-thing named Stephen Orco, and his fearful cometeers.” He leaned forward, earnestly. “Tell old Giles there’s no alarm, Jay! Tell him it’s only a precious 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 this thing be so mortal serious as that? Speak, Jay! Tell old Giles the fearful 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 in a small way, nearly two years ago. Taking things from secure places. Putting notes and his little clay snakes in impossible places—I 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 Aladoree as easy as any luckless gambler—and nothing all the legion can do to save her!”
“Aladoree?” 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 in 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 blessed genius, once—a precious talent that has twice saved the System. And a miserable 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 a poor old legionnaire to his peaceful sleep on Phobos.”
His small eyes were blinking at them, swiftly.
“But we must seek the identity of this mortal genius 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 invention. 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 of the sound and ray-proofed room.
“My orderly,” said Jay Kalam. “We must go. Gaspar Hannas will be waiting.” He looked at the timepiece on his wrist, a compact comparative chronometer that would give solar, civil and astronomical time for any zone on any planet. “And we have only two hours.”
“Two hours?” gasped Giles Habibula. “Jay, you speak as if we were condemned! What do you mean?”
“Two hours to midnight,” Jay Kalam explained. “It is then that the Basilisk is expected to strike. We have two hours to complete whatever arrangements we may be able to make, in the hope of trapping him.”
Giles Habibula peered at him.
“And what do you plan, Jay?”
“First,” Jay Kalam told him, “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 co-operation of his ten thousand special police—they will be on duty everywhere. Third, we will be waiting within the New Moon ourselves, with a score of legion operatives 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 watching. 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 mortal strange power with which the Basilisk is armed—then perhaps he can strike down the poor gambler without coming here!”
“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 betray the whereabouts of the Basilisk, so that he can be destroyed!”
Gigantic Hal Samdu stalking ahead, Giles Habibula waddling and puffing and laboring with his cane behind, they went out of the commander’s apartment, out through the chart room, and out through 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 of his vast smooth face. His black, deep-set eyes were distended and darting with fear. Sweat shone on his forehead and his white bald head. But his 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. His seamed yellow face broke slowly into a wondering grin.
“In life’s name!” he wheezed. “It’s Pedro the Shar—”
The idiot smile congealed on the white lax face of Gaspar Hannas, and his huge hands made a frightened gesture for silence. His black eyes darted over the old man swaying on the cane, and he whispered hoarsely:
“Habibula! It’s been nearly forty years. But I know you! You’re Giles the Gh—”
“Stop!” gasped Giles Habibula. “For I know you—Gaspar Hannas—in spite of your grinning mask. And I know 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.
“Gaspar Hannas!” he wheezed. “The great Gaspar 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 in the jungle—”
The big man lifted his hand again, fearfully.
“Wait, Habibula!” he gasped. “And forget what you remember.”
“Ah, so, old Giles can forget—for a price.” The old man sighed. “Life has served us mortal different, Pedr—or Gaspar Hannas,” he said sadly. “Here you have made a mighty fortune. Men say the New Moon has made you the System’s richest man—richer than John Star, even. And your poor old comrade is but a penniless and derelict exsoldier of the legion, starved and friendless and ill.” He quivered to a sob. “Pity old Giles Habibula—”
“In forty 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 hotel accommodations here is famous through all the System, Mr. Hannas. The excellence of your cuisine. The vintage of your wines!”
Gaspar 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’s mortal peril is now carrying us into your salons of chance. It’s many a long year, Mr. Hannas, since old Giles risked a dollar in anything but a friendly game. But this meeting has brought the old days back, when the wheels of chance were meat and drink—aye, and life’s precious blood—to Giles Habibula.”
Gaspar Hannas nodded, and his smile seemed to stiffen again.
“I remember, Giles,” he said. “Too well. But come. This thing is too urgent for us to be wasting time on a game. However, if you wish to play, the head croupier in the Diamond Room will give you a hundred blue chips.”
“I, too, remember,” sighed Giles Habibula, reminiscently. “At the Blue Unicorn—”
“Five hundred!” cried Gaspar 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 mortal traps. And let’s go on to the blessed tables, Let the bright wheels turn, and 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. “For no human soldier of the legion—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 no more than a fearful chimera, his mysterious power but a mortal 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, 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.
VI.
THE OLD MOON had been eclipsed two or three times 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 and revolving in the same orbital plane, 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 yet found time for amateur theatricals. Many times, 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, seeking a day 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 an 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 cloak. (The geopeller, invented by Max Eleroid, was a delicate minature 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 space-wrecked 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, he hoped. 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 in the planet’s close vicinity.
The Earth grew beneath him. A great disk of denser darkness, it was ringed with supernal fire. For the atmosphere refracted the hidden Sun’s rays into a wondrous circle that blazed with the crimson essence of all sunsets. The silvery web of the New Moon’s sign slid into that ring, and was consumed in darkness.
With a careful hand on the vernier wheel, straining his eyes in that faint red dusk, Chan Derron found his rendezvous. A magnetic anchor held the Phantom Atom to the motor house that controlled a great flimsy mirror of sodium foil.
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 argent fire, and the little ship, behind it, lay 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 Tit 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 metal 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 worksheet, his keys, and the number plate—a black-stenciled 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 gripped a 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 worksheet. “Inspect and repair Mirror 17 B 285,” was the order at its head. He scrawled at the bottom of it: “Defective switch discovered and repaired.”
How long, he wondered, before some other man, sent to do a better job, would discover his prisoner and the Phantom Atom? If he had earned 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 green cloak that he discovered there, and thrust himself into a group of tired men bound for home and supper and recreation.
