Collected short fiction, p.337
Collected Short Fiction, page 337
Mockingly warned by the Basilisk that he will be blamed for the next outrage in the New Moon—the Basilisk has promised that he will rob and murder the highest winner at the tables of that great interplanetary resort—Chan braves the fleet and the guards to enter the artificial satellite, seeking to turn the tables on the Basilisk. Disguised, he is recognized by a strange, lovely girl—no human being, he suspects, but Luroa, the notorious criminal android.
Despite all the efforts of the veteran legionnaires, Jay Kalam and Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula, the crime takes place. A little gambler named Abel Davian vanishes from the floor, and a fantastic robot appears in his place,
The robot attacks the girl. Chan, in spite of his suspicion of her, stops it with his blaster. She, believing him to be the criminal, threatens him. Attempting to explain, he is himself whisked envoy by the Basilisk.
Studying the robot, legion engineers conclude that it was built in the System of an ancient red sun, eighty light-years northward. Suspecting that System is he the headquarters of the criminal. Jay Kalam orders Aladoree to destroy it with her ancestral weapon, AKKA. But he learns that she, also, has been abducted.
Chan Derron finds himself in the New Moon’s treasure vault, which has been looted by the Basilisk. Caspar Hannas, owner of the resort, with his police, traps him there. Unarmed, but still in possession of his geopeller, Chan attempts to escape.
XIII.
THE geopeller’s tugging straps cut savagely into Chan Derron’s flesh. For the propulsive geodesic field, while it extended beyond his body, rapidly diminished, leaving considerable strain upon the straps. Air screamed about him, tried to suck the breath out of his lungs. The blood was driven from his head, so that he felt as if he were plunging into a barrier of darkness.
Bright proton guns flung up. But their deadly violet lances stabbed behind him, for 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 geopeller flung him from side to side, in a swift zigzag, with a savage force that strained his tense muscles.
Danger awaited him at the long hall’s end. For. 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 covered tray ahead of him.
Chan checked his velocity—but perilously little—and aimed his bullet flight for the fat cook’s head. He saw the man’s eves begin to stare and widen, and he set his own body for the impact.
The geodesic field shielded him somewhat from the impact, 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 bad ever dreamed of.
Acres of stoves, it seemed, and endless white conveyor tables that were loaded with dishes and food. But it was all but deserted now. For the New Moon was being emptied, he realized, by the terror of the Basilisk.
Beyond the kitchen, in the narrow quarters of the servants, he found that he had lost his directions. 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 some weapons of their own.
But the geopeller 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,” be 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 “flying pools” that were one of the New Moon’s chief 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 splendid 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.
But already the geopeller 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 outbound ships.
LEANING for a moment against the balcony door, Chan caught his breath. He must have a spacesuit. And his own—not many would fit him—was in the locker rooms beyond this frightened crowd, beside the great valve where he had entered the New Moon. He must leave as he had entered.
He could fly across the mob, he knew, in seconds and with but little risk. But sight of him, flying—when it was the mistaken fear of him that had brought them here—would surely turn fear to a stark madness of panic. Hundreds would doubtless be trampled and maimed.
After a second, Chan 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. But he could not take the other.
It took him endless minutes to make his way through the crowd. He heard the distant sob of sirens and the thunder of annunciators beating against the roar of the mob. He knew that the hunt was spreading. He was 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 had found anywhere—the workers in the great sign, he supposed, were less concerned about the Basilisk. He hurried to the locker where he had left his armor, stripped off his borrowed clothing, flung himself into it, and strode toward the great valve.
The inner gate was open. A crew of silver-armored technicians were just marching out. Chan entered, as the last of them stepped out, and made a gesture to the man at the controls. But he had turned to listen, as:
“Warning!” an annunciator crackled. “Close all locks—until Derron is caught. This man is attempting to escape the New Moon. There is a half-million reward. Derron is six feet three, believed—”
Chan saw quick suspicion change to certainty in the eyes of the man at the controls, heard the beginning of his muffled shout to the armored men. He caught the glint of quick-drawn weapons.
He leaped forward to the outer gate. His bright-clad fist shattered the glass over the emergency lever—intended to be used only when the massive valve was closing upon 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 geopeller stopped his spinning flight, brought him to the platform where he had landed.
He found the wire marked “Sector 17B,” snapped the belt of his suit to it, and squeezed the little spindle. The geopeller sent him out along the wire.
Five hundred miles to go. The great sign’s web spread about him, against the dark of space. Silver wires burned white in the glare of the Sun. Great mirrors glinted, filters glowed red and blue and green. And he glimpsed the gibbous Earth, huge and mistily brilliant, so near that he could almost reach out and touch the disk of snowy cloud that covered Europe.
Five hundred miles—but he pushed the geopeller 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 motor house.
His searching eyes found the Phantom Atom. The tiny ship was safe—incredible good fortune!—still hidden behind the great foil mirror. The geopeller carried him to its valve.
The first intimation of disaster came when he saw that the prisoner lie had left here, space armor welded to the housing, was gone. His heart stood still. Was this some new, ruthless trick of the Basilisk?
He plunged through the valves, and came face to face with a man waiting for him in the corridor within.
A very fat, short 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. He was blinking ominously at Chan, with pale small eyes. His fat hands held a thick cane, so that it pointed straight at Chan’s body—and a deadly little black orifice was visible in the ferrule that tipped it.
“Ah, so, Mr. Basilisk!” he wheezed triumphantly. “You may be mortal clever—but Giles Habibula has got you!”
XIV.
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, his flagship, at the head of Hal Samdu’s fleet of ten geodesic cruisers. At full power they raced northward, toward Alpha Draconis—which had been the pole star in 3500 B.C., worshiped by the ancient Egyptians.
What mysterious object?
Every observer in the fleet was set to find the answer to that question. Every electronic telescope and mass detector was driven to the utmost of its power. And. by the time they were one day out from the New Moon, the answer—or part of it—had been discovered.
Jay Kalam, tired and pale from the long strain of the chase, restlessly pacing the deep-piled rugs of his soundproofed 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!” cried a tired, excited voice from the great ship’s observatory. “Forty-four minutes of arc from Alpha Draconis. It’s still invisible—albedo must he very low. But the mass detectors indicate an object of nearly twenty million tons!
“A strange thing, commander! This object, whatever it is, must he 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 humming voice from the instrument. “Until we can see it, we won’t know whether it’s just a rock—or something else.”
“Keep the telescopes on the spot,” Jay Kalam ordered. “And use every instrument to search space ahead of us, until we pick up Derron’s ship . . . The communications room is standing by for another message from Giles Habibula, and the vortex gun will be ready for action.”
The atomic vortex gun, a weapon borrowed from the strange science of the conquered Medusae, was, next to AKKA, the most deadly instrumentality possessed by mankind. The colossal vortex projector built into the nose of the Inflexible could hurl out a spinning, growing etheric field whose white central sun of atomic annihilation could swallow a planetoid.
Shift and changing shift, the gun crews 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 and waited—waited in vain—for any further word from Giles Habibula.
But the weary commander of the legion, sleeplessly pacing the silent, empty luxury of his apartments upon the racing flagship, restlessly combing his white forelock back with anxious thin hands, received other messages. They came by visi-wave from the System behind—for the hard-driven fleet was already beyond the light-speed of the ultrawave. And their import was all of alarm.
The first came from the captain in charge of the legion operatives who had been detailed to shadow the three suspects on the New Moon—Amo Brelekko and John Comaine and Caspar Hannas. The three had vanished!
“John Comaine mysteriously disappeared from his laboratory, with two of our men on duty outside the only door.” the report stated. “Caspar 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. And Amo Brelekko was taken from the floor of the Diamond Room, as the little gambler, Davian, was taken—and in his place, before the few appalled spectators who remained upon 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 Captain Civic, asking for further information. The reply, relayed from Rocky Mountain Base, informed him that this officer had also vanished!
Krrr! Krrr! Krrr!
It was the penetrating beat of the emergency call, G-39, that heralded the next call. And the message was more disturbing. Relayed from Lars Eccard, chairman of the Green Hall Council, it ran:
MY DEAR COMMANDER:
It is my duty to order the legion of space to take immediate measures for the effective defense of the Green Hall and the Council. I have received mysterious warnings, signed by that criminal who calls himself the Basilisk, stating that all members of the Council are to be abducted, one by one. No demands were made. The criminal offers no way of escape. And several members of the Council are already unaccountably missing—
There the message from the statesman was terminated. A note from the visi-wave operator added:
The dictation of the above message was interrupted. Pages entering the chambers of Chairman Eccard found that he was gone. And reports from subordinate officials at the Green Hall confirms the first rumors that all sixty members of the Council have been abducted.
THE Green Hall—kidnaped! That was a staggering blow. Jay Kalam slumped wearily into a chair. Those sixty men and women had been the supreme government of the System. Representatives of the local planetary governments, of capital and labor, of the various arts, crafts, and sciences, they had been the very cream of civilization. And now—on what diabolical whim none could say—they had been snatched away by the shadowed power of the Basilisk.
“Why?” The tired red eves of the commander stared across his great empty table, at the blank wall beyond. “Why take them?”
With an uncanny promptness that startled him, the keening heat of the emergency signal came again from his communicator. His nervous hands set the little disk, and put it to his ear. What he heard was not the crisp, familiar voice of the legion announcer at Rocky Mountain Base.
It was a muffled, distorted whisper. It rasped and croaked from the little instrument. It mocked the tired commander, jeered at him.
“I’ll tell you. commander.” it husked and hummed in his ear. “I took them because I want the System to know my power. I want every man on every planet to shudder and grow white when he thinks of the Basilisk. I want men to regard me as angry gods were once regarded, before science destroyed them. I want every man to know that his smallest thought, turned against the Basilisk, can lead surely to unpleasant death.
“For I have suffered manifold indignities, commander, that must be avenged. Many once ignored me, scorned me, injured me. Now they shall look up where they once looked down, worship whom once they hated. For now I am the Basilisk.
“Therefore, commander, I am taking one hundred of the foremost citizens from the System. They have been the leaders in 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 peculiar lesson to mankind. One, out of the hundred, shall be permitted to survive and return to the System, so that he may teach the lesson of the Basilisk to the rest of humanity.”
A curiously unpleasant little chuckling sound rasped and whirred out of the communicator. Some cold, gloating madness in it sent a shudder through Jay Kalam’s thin, weary body; set rough goose pimples over his flesh.
“One hundred, commander!” croaked that leering voice. “And one will come back to tell the rest. You already know most of the hundred, commander. Aladoree, with her secret weapon—what good is AKKA, commander, against the shadow of the Basilisk? John Star. Bob Star, and his wife and their child—there would have been another, commander; you keep few secrets from the Basilisk! I have taken a few others of your most conspicuous legionnaires. I have taken a score of private individuals, mostly scientists and financiers—among them three men you know, from the New Moon. Hannas and Comaine and Brelekko. I have taken the sixty members of the Green Hall Council—and you could not name sixty others in all the System, commander, equally distinguished in statesmanship and science and art.”
The humming whisper paused. Again that mocking, twisted chuckle. Jay Kalam’s hand tensed and trembled on the little black disk, and his weary, aching body was cold with sudden sweat.
“The total now is ninety-nine,” came that husking rasp again. “I need one more to complete my hundred. Knowing the other ninety-nine. Commander Kalam, you will not need to be told who the hundredth is to be. And now farewell, commander—until we meet again!”
With that, the humming whisper ceased. Jay Kalam dropped the communicator. A swift hand snatched the barytron blaster from his belt, and he looked swiftly around 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, on the visi-wave relay.
