Collected short fiction, p.335
Collected Short Fiction, page 335
“Who is that?” Jay Kalam prompted. “The man who built the New Moon,” husked Brelekko. “John Comaine.”
“But he is employed by Hannas.”
“John Comaine is the slave of Gaspar Hannas,” rasped Brelekko. “I know the story—I alone, besides the two of them. A young man, a brilliant scientist but mad with the thirst for wealth, Comaine came to the battered hulk that was the first New Moon. He lost too much—money that was not his to lose. Hannas let him pay the debt with his science—and then held the new crime over him. Comaine tried at first to escape, but every effort left him deeper in the power of Hannas. He still has the pride and the heart of a scientist. He first dreamed of the New Moon, commander, not as a gambling resort, but as a superobservatory and laboratory of all the sciences, to be stationed out beyond Pluto. It was the ruthless power of Hannas that turned his dream into this. Would it be too strange, commander, if a scientist, revolting against twenty years of such slavery, should make his science strike back?”
“Perhaps not,” said Jay Kalam. “Thank you, Brelekko.”
He detailed two plain-clothes men to shadow the gambler, and sent for John Comaine. When the engineer appeared, stiffly awkward, the square stern mask of his slightly pop-eyed face hiding any emotion, the commander asked him the same question about the Basilisk.
Comaine shook his big blond head, impassive as a statue.
“The Basilisk is a scientist,” said his flat, harsh voice. “I know, commander, because I have been setting my own knowledge against his. And I have failed. I have met only one mind equal in ability to the feats of the Basilisk—the mind of Dr. Max Eleroid.”
“But Eleroid is dead!”
“My only suggestion, commander,” the engineer said flatly, “is that the cadaver in question was not properly identified.”
Two more operatives were sent to follow him.
AN ORDERLY, in the legion green, was admitted.
“Commander Kalam.” He saluted. “We have reports from the principal stock exchanges on all the planets. As you surmised, sir, the shares and obligations of the New Moon Syndicate fell precipitately upon news of what happened here—to about three per cent, in fact, of their former value.
“The reports confirm your belief, commander, that a financial battle has been in progress for control of the Syndicate. One side has evidently capitulated. The other is now able to buy at its own price.”
Jay Kalam nodded gravely.
“Has the buyer been traced?”
“It has always been very difficult to discover anything about the affairs of the New Moon Syndicate, sir. They are handled by very devious means. The legion exerted pressure, however, upon several brokers. The reports indicate, almost surely, that the buyer is Caspar Hannas!”
“Eh?” Old Giles Habibula started. “But Hannas is the New Moon’s master, already.”
“He is head of Syndicate,” Jay Kalam told him. “Originally, he was sole owner of the enterprise. But the cost of constructing the New Moon, while the actual sum has never been revealed, must have been staggering—far beyond the resources of Hannas. He was forced to sell a vast amount of stock, and the Syndicate incurred tremendous obligations.
“Out of that fact comes the chief reason for suspecting that Hannas himself is the Basilisk.”
“Eh, Jay?” Giles Habibula turned pale and began to perspire. “And here we’re in the New Moon, in the very clutch of his mortal power! But why do you think it, Jay?”
“Even through the cloud of mystery that is always kept around the affairs of the Syndicate, it’s clear that Gaspar Hannas was about to lose the New Moon. The activities of the Basilisk have enabled him to buy back control at his own price.
“There—in the difference between bankruptcy and possession of the System’s greatest fortune—you have motive enough, I think.”
“Aye,” agreed Giles Habibula. “But you said this Basilisk must be a scientist—and Gaspar Hannas is no scientist.”
“But he has a very able one—if Brelekko told the truth—completely under his thumb. John Comaine.” Jay Kalam rubbed thoughtfully at his jaw, and then his dark eyes went abruptly to Giles Habibula. “However,” he said, “all the weight of evidence still rests against Chan Derron.
“For Chan Derron took Dr. Eleroid’s invention—which is probably the very scientific agency that has baffled us. He has been connected—though sometimes a little too obviously—with every crime of the Basilisk. He was here, loaded down with concealed instruments, when little Davian was taken. And again he has mysteriously escaped.
“I have been reluctant to believe that so fine a legionnaire as Captain Derron was, could have turned to such a monster as the Basilisk. But the android accounts for that. Probably Luroa was the mysterious spy who frightened Dr. Eleroid! And then she met Chan Derron.”
Somberly, his dark eyes looked far away.
“He would not be the first man degraded and destroyed by the fatal allure of the evil creatures of Eldo Arrynu!”
“So, Jay,” sighed Giles Habibula. “But yet they were mortal beautiful!”
Jay Kalam’s glance came back to the old man, suddenly intent.
“Giles,” he said softly. “I’ve an idea!”
“Eh, Jay!” The fishy eyes blinked uneasily. “You’re getting too mortal many ideas about a poor crippled old hero of the legion, Jay. But what is it?”
“You are ordered, Giles, to find Chan Derron.”
“But we’re all looking for Derron.”
“You haven’t been exerting your full capabilities, Giles. As commander of the legion, I order you to find Derron and the woman with him. By any means you can. You will work alone. But keep in touch with the legion—take our experimental portable visi-wave relay—and call for any aid you need. Get into their confidence. You have boasted enough of your cloudy past—you might well pretend to be another criminal! Learn everything you can. Learn where the headquarters of the Basilisk are, and the machine—whatever it is—so we’ll be able to use AKKA. And trap Derron and the android.”
Giles Habibula licked his pale fat lips. He gulped. His round seamed face looked greenish-yellow, and it glittered with sweat. He gasped for breath, and mopped with a trembling hand at his bald brow.
“Jay!” he wheezed at last. “Jay, my mortal soul! Are you out of your blessed mind? In all these years, hasn’t old Giles given enough to the System—aye, his blessed all!—without being flung into this nest of fearful horror?”
His fat hand quivered on Jay Kalam’s arm.
“In life’s name, Jay, stay your cruel command! Ah, think, Jay! Why poor old Giles might be snatched from beside you at this blessed moment—to be found in the black Euthanasia vault, with the blade of the Basilisk in his poor dead back!”
“That is my command, Giles,” Jay Kalam said gravely. “Remember, it is for the sake of Aladoree.”
Giles Habibula caught a sobbing breath.
“For Aladoree!” he wheezed. “For her, Jay . . . I’ll go.”
THEN the commander of the legion went suddenly tense, and his lean face went a little white.
Krrr! Krrr! Krrr!
The tiny sound, peculiarly penetrating and insistent, was humming from the communicator hung by its thin chain about his neck. The commander’s lean deliberate hands, drawing the little black disk from under his clothing, trembled a little.
“It’s G-39,” he told Giles Habibula. “Emergency!”
Giles Habibula watched apprehensively as he touched the dial, whispered a code response, and lifted the little disk to his ear. The straining ears of the old legionnaire failed to hear anything. And the face of Jay Kalam didn’t lose its grave, contained reserve. But his failure to breathe, and his frozen stiffness, betrayed enough.
“You’ve had bad news, Jay,” whispered Giles Habibula, when at last the commander lowered the disk and broke communication. “Aye, mortal bad!”
Jay Kalam nodded, very slowly. His lean face, beneath that one white lock on his forehead, looked the oldest that Giles Habibula had ever seen it.
“That was one of the subordinate officers, calling through the visi-wave relay at Base from the depot of the cometary expedition, on Triton.” His voice was very quiet. “The depot has been robbed, Giles. All our files and specimens rifled.”
“Eh, Jay!” Giles Habibula blinked at him. “The secrets of the cometeers!”
“All our most valuable—or most dangerous—notes were taken, Giles. Weapons and instrumentalities that we had planned to guard at least a thousand years, before civilization could possibly be ready to assimilate them. All gone!”
“Was it . . . the Basilisk?”
The stricken head nodded again.
“A little black clay snake was found on Bob Star’s desk, inside the vaults; none of the locks on the vaults, by the way, were disturbed. And they found another clue. Dropped on the floor was a yellow reservation check, from the New Moon. It was dated yesterday. And the name on it was Dr. Charles Derrel.”
“Derrel?” gasped Giles Habibula. “But, Jay, it isn’t six hours since I picked that check out of Chan Derron’s pocket—and Triton, by the swiftest cruiser, is four mortal days away!”
“The best proof yet.” Jay Kalam said gravely, “that the Basilisk is Chan Derron.” His lean hand gestured. “Now you’ve got to get him, Giles.”
“But . . . Bob?” Giles Habibula was wheezing anxiously. “You say a subordinate was speaking? Where was Bob, Jay?”
The face of Jay Kalam was stiffly bleak.
“The officer said that Captain Robert Star is mysteriously missing from the depot,” his faint voice said. “Giles, Bob Star is doubtless now in the hand of the Basilisk! Alive—we don’t know—or already dead.”
Giles Habibula lifted himself laboriously to his feet, with the cane.
“Bob, the poor lad!” he sobbed bitterly. “ ’Tis mortal plain that I must go, Jay. For Bob, and for Aladoree. But how shall I find Chan Derron, Jay?”
The seamed yellow globe of his head shook hopelessly. “How can one poor old man track down the fearful monster that strikes at midnight here, and on the far-off moon of Neptune before the blessed dawn?”
His pale eyes rolled.
“Or, in life’s precious name, what if I do find him? And the mortal woman? One crippled old soldier, to face the System’s two most frightful criminals. Aye, to face all the evil power of the Basilisk! And that woman, whose very beauty is a false mirage and a consuming flame and a poisoned blade!”
He blinked, and caught a gasping breath.
“But, for all that, I must go! Farewell, Jay. Farewell. And please tell Aladoree that poor old Giles Habibula was loyal to the end.” He thrust out a trembling hand, and the commander grasped it. “For it is mortal likely, Jay, that Giles Habibula will never be seen again!”
And he waddled slowly out into the corridors of the New Moon.
XI.
BACK in the rich, soft-toned simplicity of the hidden, ray-armored apartments aft the chart rooms of the mighty Inflexible, once more in the trim gold-and-green of his uniform. Jay Kalam was waiting. The deep muffled song of the geodynes reached him briefly, as a door was opened. And Hal Samdu came stalking in, with a worried look on his rugged, ugly face.
“Well, Hal?” The quiet reserve of the commander’s voice did not conceal his eagerness. “What is your report on the robot?”
The big gnarled hands of the admiral general laid a thick green envelope on the table before Jay Kalam. They clenched, as he raised them, with a savage force.
“If I could reach this Derron—” His great voice was thick with a baffled agony. “To think, Jay, that all the legion can give Aladoree no promise of safety!”
“I know it is appalling,” said the grave commander. “But your report?”
“In the envelope,” rumbled Hal Samdu. “I got together twenty men, half of them veterans of the comet expedition, all of them specialists in some field of science. They took the robot thing apart, and studied every piece of it, by every possible means. The lab work was finished, twelve hours ago, at base. Since, they’ve been discussing and checking the meaning of their discoveries, and writing up the report.”
Jay Kalam was leaning forward, anxiously.
“What did they find?”
Hal Samdu shook his rugged white head.
“I’m no scientist, Jay. It’s all in the envelope.”
“But,” the commander asked, “in brief—”
“As you surmised, Jay, it’s an illegal robot. It makes use of biophysical principles forbidden in the same Green Hall statutes that outlawed the androids. The most similar illicit model in the museum was one taken shortly after the war with the Medusae. It was built by a young Dr. Enos Clagg, who was sentenced to three years on Ebron.”
“The details?”
Hal Samdu touched one big knobby finger with another.
“First, Jay,” he rumbled, “they concluded that the thing was designed by a human engineer—a man trained in the System.”
Jay Kalam nodded. “Why?”
“Because so many familiar engineering principles were used in its construction. There were none of those strange freaks of design—strange to us—that we found in the machines of the Medusae and the cometeers.
“The thing was driven by an atomic power tube. There were pinions, shafts, cams, cables, levers—all used just as a supremely good human engineer would use them, if you set him to build a mechanical imitation of . . . of whatever monster the thing was copied from.”
Jay Kalam was rubbing reflectively at his jaw.
“That fits Derron well enough,” he said. “He took high honors, I remember, in the engineering section of the academy. But, for that matter, it fits the android, or Hannas, or Brelekko or Comaine. What else, Hal?”
The gigantic captain general bent down another gnarled finger.
“Second,” he said, “they agreed that the thing was built outside the System.”
Jay Kalam nodded again, without surprise. “Where?”
“On a planet somewhat larger than the Earth, they concluded, comparatively near a dying red sun—a star of the type designated as K9e. The surface gravitation of the planet is about 1250gr—about one and a quarter times Earth gravity. The atmosphere is denser than Earth’s. It contains sufficient free, oxygen to sustain human life—but also enough free chlorine to make it very unpleasant.”
THE commander was listening intently.
“And the basis of those conclusions—”
“The metals of the robot, in the first place. They are mostly aluminum and beryllium bronzes. They are alloyed according to standard metallurgical formulae. But spectrographic analysis proves that they were not smelted from any ores mined in the System. The impurities are minute in quantity, but the metallurgists declared that the evidence is conclusive.
“The deposits of corrosion, in the second place, on the body of the thing. They contained chlorides, due to the action of free chlorine. And you recall the stink of chlorine in the air, when the thing appeared?”
Jay Kalam nodded, intently.
“In the third place, Jay,” Hal Samdu rumbled on, “there are the life forms they found in the green slime clinging to the thing. Micro-organisms of types unknown in the System. I’m no bacteriologist, and you’ll find details in the report.
“But some of them are queer things, I gather. They perish, in the normal conditions of the system, for want of chlorine. And thrive on the chlorine in some of the common bactericides. Some varieties break down chlorides, and liberate free chlorine. If they ever got established in the oceans of Earth—” Hal Samdu’s cragged face set grimly. “I hope Derron doesn’t think of that!”
The commander was asking, “What else?”
“They attacked the problem from another angle,” said Hal Samdu. “The robot thing was obviously a mechanical reproduction of a living original. It has many features, such as the scales, beak, teeth, gill and nostril vents, which, being useless to a machine, prove that conclusively. And the fact tells a great deal about the alien environment in which the original lived.”
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 creature 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, 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 intent 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 precise data on the atmospheric density and surface gravity.
“From a study of the cooling system, heat insulation, and lubricants used—checked against the optimum temperature conditions for the strange microorganisms—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 range 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?”
