The legion of space the.., p.46
The Legion of Space: The Complete Saga, page 46
For the make-up on her perfect face dissolved and shifted. Her violet eyes turned a clear ice-green. The platinum splendor of her hair became a glory of red-lit mahogany. Yes, indeed, he knew her face!
He had studied every feature of it, for lonely hours, on the picture beside his own on the bulkhead of the Phantom Atom. This glorious and deadly being was no woman! Site was Luroa; last survivor of the androids; brilliant, criminal synthetic monster. The price on her life matched that on his own.
Chan Derron smiled, gently, and eased the dark glasses on his face.
“You know two words,” he whispered softly. “But I know one—Luroa.”
There was a flicker of white tension on her face, he thought. The flash of something dark and deadly in the deep pools of her eyes. But in an instant she was smiling at him—radiantly.
The food, Dr. Charles,” she said. “We’re letting it grow cold. Let us eat, for we must be in the Diamond Room before midnight!”
WHEN THEY were in the gaming room, the girl bought a stack of chips—displaying a sheaf of green certificates that, Chan thought, spoke amply of the sinister skills of Luroa. They played, he placing the chips at her direction. And won. Perhaps, Chan thought—he had few illusions about the role of chance at the New Moon’s table—because the magnet of her beauty always crowded the table where she played.
Her violet eyes were watching him very closely he knew, and all that happened about them, and the minutes that fled. She was waiting, he realized, for midnight—and for him to betray himself as the Basilisk.
“Vanya,” he whispered once, when they bad a moment alone, “I came here only to hunt this criminal. If you’ll let me—”
“Wait,” she said inexorably, “till midnight.”
When the three legionnaires came upon them. Chan Derron knew the commander and Hal Samdu at once. Even in mufti, they were unmistakable to any man who had served in the legion. For a little time he put hope in his disguise—fervidly regretting that he had not been six inches shorter.
The return of his check and keys, however, by Jay Kalam, convinced him that he had been recognized—that the little fat man’s spectacular maneuvers had been no more than an elaborate accompaniment to the picking of his pocket.
It surprised him that the girl spoke so promptly in his defense. Sense of her surpassing beauty kept rising above his fear of her—above the cold instinctive horror of the android. When the commander had gone, he turned to her with a little smile of relief and gratitude. “Thank you, Vanya.”
Her smile of response was breath-taking—but all intended, he swiftly realized, for the spectators. For her golden voice, dropped softer than a whisper, yet pitilessly cold, rang ominouly at his ear: “No thanks are due me, Chan Derron. Kalam and Samdu and old Habibula know you as well as I do—and my identification meant nothing to them. They are just waiting—as I am—for midnight.”
And midnight came.
The girl, as the moment stalked upon them, had gripped Chan’s arm. Her small fingers sank desperately into his flesh—stronger, he thought, than most men’s. And her keen violet eyes were watching every movement of his, he knew, as sharply as he watched the promised victim of the Basilisk—gray, trembling little Abel Davian.
Her other hand, he marked, and wondered at it, was toying oddly with the great white jewel at her throat. What manner of stone, he was asking himself in that final moment, was this huge gem that had the prismatic sheen and the intricate hexagonal perfection of a great snowflake?
THE THIN little man, trembling With the burden of his winnings, paused and sneezed. And then Chan Derron heard that hideous, feral purring. He saw Abel Davian flicker, grow queerly rigid;—and saw that he was gone. He felt a breath of dank, ice-cold air. He was flung toward the spot where Davian had been, was dragged incontinently back.
Then—hardly aware that he was strangling to a whiff of some choking, acrid gas—he was staring with bewildered and incredulous eyes at the monstrous thing that stood in Davian’s place.
Monstrous—it was like nothing men had found in all the System.
Standing on three thin, swaying, rubbery-looking legs, it reared twelve feet high. Queerly teardrop-shaped, its body was covered with close-set, green-black scales. Three huge eyes, of a dull-and sinister crimson, glared from its armored head. It had a disproportionately large, jet-black beak, yawning open to reveal multiple rows of saberlike teeth. An unpleasant fringe of long green serpentine tentacles hung under the beak.
A greenish slime was dripping from that fearful body to the polished floor, exactly, Chan thought, as if it had just that instant been snatched out of the muck of some primordial jungle. Beneath the slime, its dark scales had an odd, metallic glint. _ And there was that strangling, pungent reek, which Chan slowly recognized to be chlorine.
For a little time it stood almost motionless, twisting that frightful, long-beaked head, so that those three enormous red eyes, which looked in three separate directions, could survey all the circle of puny humans about it.
A queer strained hush had fallen on the Diamond Room. For a moment there was not even a scream. Then those nearer, choked and blinded with the breath of chlorine that had come with the creature, began to stumble uncertainly back. The first hysterical laugh, turned into a thin, sobbing scream. And the hush became an insane stampede.
But already the thing had moved. Three wings were abruptly extended from its armored back. Queerly, they unrolled: They were translucently green, and delicately ribbed with darker emerald. One on each side and the third, taillike, behind, they raised and fell, one by one, experimentally, and then became a blur of motion.
Out of that fearful black beak came an appalling bellow. Reverberating against the lofty vault of the Diamond Room, dripping and clotted with uncanny menace, it gave wings to the fugitive thousands.
And the creature itself, with an ungainly but amazing swiftness, ran forward on the three swaying limbs. Its wings made a mounting thunder of sound, and the wind rushing from them was choking with chlorine.
“Back, Vanya!” gasped Chan.
He was pulling the girl from the creature’s path, snatching for the barytron blaster under his cloak. But she twisted away from him, with an easy, pantherine strength. Her cold voice whipped back at him, deadly:
“So you did it—Basilisk!”
Chan leaped after her. But the great wing struck his head, crushed him down. Falling, he glimpsed the girl standing in the monster’s path. Both her hands, he saw, were lifted to her strange white pendant.
Then the green tentacles, squirming snakelike beneath that beak, snatched her up. The thing lifted with her, above the expanding ring of panic-stricken fugitives, and flew with her swiftly down the hall.
“Get him!” It was the great voice of Hal Samdu, roaring vainly out against the shrieking tumult. “Get Chan Derron!”
BLIND AND coughing from the chlorine, the giant was staggering about, blinking his eyes, waving a big glittering barytron blaster. Jay Kalam, beside him, strangled and voiceless, was trying to call to the plain-clothes men.
“Aye,” wheezed Giles Habibula from beneath a table. “And get the mortal monster!”
Caspar Hannas was choking a hoarse call to his police.
“Half a million!” he bellowed. “To the man who gets Chan Derron!”
Stunned dismay and poison gas, Chan realized, had given him a bare few seconds to attempt escape. And, strapped to his body beneath the green cloak, he had the means—the compact geopeller unit from his spacesuit. The control cable ran down his sleeve, and he gripped the heavy little spindle in his hand.
A swift pressure on it—and he rose silently from the midst of his enemies. Flying high beneath the vault of the Diamond Room, he soared after the monster and the girl.
White, silent barytron bolts stabbed after him. Concrete exploded from the painted vault, rained down into the panic on the floor. He breathed the sharpness of ozone, and felt one faint shock.
But the geopeller, for all its compactness, was swift—swift enough for interplanetary flight. Chan pursued a darting zigzag. Seconds, only, had gone, when he came to the end of the long Diamond Room. But the monster, with the girl, had already vanished.
The way of their going was plain. The alien creature had scorned to use the wide doorway beneath. A ragged opening yawned in the top of the vault. Chan twisted the spindle in his hand. The geopeller flung him up through it.
And his brain, refreshed by the cool rushing wind of his flight, made a swift decision. This moment—when he was free and in the air, when the monster was creating an unwitting diversion—was obviously his chance to escape. And a faintness of dread impelled him to flight, for the girl’s accusation and the encounter with Jay Kalam had brought back all the horror of the Devil’s Rock.
But he hadn’t come here to escape. He had come to hunt the Basilisk. And the monster was the one visible clue to the identity and the methods of that amazing criminal. A little shudder tensed his straight-extended, flying body. But he knew that he must follow the monster.
The girl, he tried to tell himself, didn’t matter. The pitiless synthetic brain of Luroa, he knew, was a greater danger to him than all the legion. It would be better if the monster destroyed her. Yet, for all that, thought of Vanya Eloyan spurred him to a frantic haste.
Beyond the hole in the massive wall—which could only have been torn, he thought, by a barytron bolt or some force equally powerful, and which, therefore, meant that the monster was armed with something far more formidable than tentacles and fangs—he plunged into the corridors of the New Moon’s museum.
The monster and the girl were gone from sight. Far down one hall a little cluster of people were running frantically. Beside a glass case stood one of the attendants, with a yellow crescent on his uniform. Chan dropped out of the air beside him.
“Which way?” he demanded.
The man stood wooden, glassy-eyed. His arms made a sudden defensive gesture, against Chan—although the geopeller had been used a little in sports, it was still new enough so that a flying, wingless man must have seemed almost as startling as the monster.
Chan shook the attendant. “Which way did it take her?”
“It couldn’t be!” the man sobbed. “There isn’t such a thing!” His eyes came into focus again, and he stared at Chan’s face as if doubting its humanity. “A thing carrying a woman?” he whispered. “It went on up, into the unfinished spaces. That way!”
He pointed—and then bent suddenly, very sick.
TWISTING and squeezing the spindle, Chan darted upward again. Wind shrieked in his ears, tore at his cloak. He found the shattered hole in the ceiling, plunged through into an incompleted part of the New Moon’s structure.
Above bare floors, naked beams and girders and cables soared upward into gulfs of darkness. Unshaded atomic lights burned here and there, like stars in a metal universe. They cast blue, fantastic shadows. It was thousands of feet, beyond the webs of metal, to the black curving metal of the New Moon’s hull.
Chan Derron peered, bewildered for a moment, into that blue mysterious chasm of sinister shadows and spidery metal. His right hand dragged the barytron blaster from beneath his cloak. Then he heard the monster.
The awesome bellow reverberated weirdly through the maze of empty steel, it rolled thunderously back from the metal hull. But it gave some clue to direction. The geopeller flung Chan upward again. And at last, on a high platform that the builder had used, he came upon the creature and the girl.
A far blue light cast a grotesque web of black shadows across the scene. The girl lay supine. The green-black horror of the monster crouched over her, hideous beak yawning wide. The serpentine tentacles were writhing about her throat.
The geopeller hurled Chan forward. The barytron blaster flashed in his extended right hand. The first white bolt struck the dark-scaled body, with a flare of green incandescence—without harm, it seemed. And the green tentacles flung up a weapon.
A barytron blaster of the newest legion design, identical with his own!
The merest fraction of its energy could have electrocuted—exploded—his undefended body. But his second bolt, into the monster’s central crimson eye, took instant effect. The blaster fell. Queerly stiffened, the creature toppled toward the girl.
Ignoring a voice of fearful protest in his heart, Chan sent himself forward. The same arm that held the blaster slipped under the girl. The geopeller lifted them both. The monster came crashing down behind them. The diaphanous green wings, when it struck, abruptly unrolled. They remained rigidly extended, and the thing did not move again.
Chan dropped, beside it, and set the breathless girl upon her feet.
Her lithe body had been vibrantly warm in his arms. There was subtle intoxication in the perfume of her platinum hair. The radiance of her white smile made him glad, tor a moment, that he had saved her.
“Thank you”—some husky magic in her breathless voice set his heart to racing—“Chan!”
Her violet eyes slowly closed, and her scarlet lips swayed toward his. And then, with an unexpected pantherine quickness, she was gone from his arms. A clever, numbing blow from her elbow had struck some nerve center in his neck. A clever, savage strength had wrested the blaster out of his hand.
He swayed, dazedly. Here, far from the gravity plates in the “bottom” of the New Moon’s hull, their attraction was somewhat decreased, and it required a little time for muscles to adjust themselves to the lessened strains.
When he recovered, the girl w-as already backing alertly away from him, covering him with his own weapon.
“Well, Mr. Basilisk!” her soft voice mocked him. “Let’s see you get away this time!”
Chan caught his breath. The blue darkness and the shadowy strands of steel spun about him. He had foreseen this danger from the girl—and yet the very peril of her beauty made it all incredible.
His hand tightened on the spindle of the geopeller. Small chance of distancing the bolt of barytrons, he knew. But the power of the little unit could hurl his body against her—
“Still, Chan Derron!” her voice rang sharply. “Open your hand.” The blaster gestured alertly.
His fingers relaxed. He tried, hopelessly, to protest:
“Vanya, you can’t believe that I’m the Basilisk. For, all the time, you were there at my side—”
“Silence!” The bright weapon-lifted; imperatively. “I was there,” she said, “close enough to feel the mechanisms strapped to your body, Derron. To feel the wires in your sleeve.”
Narrowed, her violet eyes had a deadly glint.
“I had you then, Derron—until you sent your little pet to carry me away.
Now I’ve got you again—and you won’t escape!” He wondered at the fingers of her left hand, lifted to that strange white jewel at her throat. “But I’ll give you one last chance.”
He saw the tension in her hand, saw the ruthless purpose behind the white perfect mask of her face. Cold as sleet, her voice whipped at him:
“What did you do with Dr. Eleroid’s invention?”
Sick, helpless, he shook his head. “Where is the machine you control with the instruments on your body—” He knew she was going to fire, when he didn’t answer. He could hurt himself at her with the geopeller. Two deaths, instead of one. But her pitiless beauty—That monstrous pur came suddenly. The girl and everything beyond flickered abruptly, as if a wall of vitrilith had dropped between. He saw her hand stiffen on the blaster, saw the white bolt’s flash.
The last thing he saw was her white face, with grim suspicion changed to amazed and hateful certainty. Her image dissolved in a chasm of starless darkness. And Chan Derron was hurled into black and airless cold.
X.
“YOU SAY it’s dead?” quavered Giles Habibula. “Jay, you’re sure the fearful thing is dead?”
High in the blue dim web of shadows and metal beneath the New Moon’s shell, the grotesque monstrosity sprawled stiffly on the bare platform. Jay Kalam and Hal Samdu and Gaspar Hannas were staring down at it, wonderingly. Giles Habibula hung apprehensively back near the elevator that had brought them up.
“Quite dead,” Jay Kalam assured him. “Chan Derron evidently beat us to it. Who would have guessed he had a geopeller unit under his cloak? And then got away—with the girl!”
“Got away!” It was a frightened, groan, from the gigantic, black-clad master of the New Moon. His foolish smile was ludicrously pathetic. “And all our guests know he did! There’s a panic at the docks! Every vessel going out is already booked to capacity. In twenty-four hours there won’t be a visitor in the New Moon—and not many of our own employees—unless the Basilisk is caught!”
The great white hands of Hannas clenched, impotently, as: “The Basilisk has ruined me, commander!” he groaned. “Or Chan Derron has. Already.”
“Keep your men after him.” Jay Kalam’s gesture swept the dusky labyrinth of shadow-clotted steel. “He could be here—anywhere. With that woman—” His dark brow furrowed. “There was something about that woman—you observed her, Hal?”
“Aye, Jay,” rumbled Hal Samdu. “She was beautiful—too beautiful for any good! She had that destroying beauty that belonged to those evil androids of Eldo Arrynu.”
“Android!” Jay Kalam started at the word. “She could be! She could be Luroa—Stephen Orco’s last sinister sister!” He set his lean fingers deliberately tip to tip. “The New Moon would be her natural hunting ground, and Chan Derron the sort of confederate she would seek. But she didn’t look like—”
“Ah, Jay, but she did!” protested Giles Habibula, plaintively. “ ’Twas mortal evident! The hair and the eyes were changed, of course. And make-up cunningly used, to alter the proportions of her blessed face—ah, Jay, ’twas a lovely one! But all its precious features were identical with those on the mortal bill of reward!”
Jay Kalam spun on him.
“Why didn’t you speak?”
