Collected Short Fiction, page 339
“I’m with you, Giles.” she said, “until the Basilisk is destroyed.” And the old legionnaire wondered at a difference in her voice. Somehow it seemed naive, bewildered, troubled—somehow like a child’s. “Come, Giles.” she said, and beckoned toward the cabin she bad taken. “There’s something I must tell you.”
XVI.
A NAKED black rock broke a lonely sea. The sea bad a muddy green-black color, cut with long strips of floating yellow-red weed. Its surface bad an oily, glistening smoothness. The sky above it was a smoky, greenish blue. And the luminary that rose so very slowly in it, baking the rock under merciless rays, seemed larger than the Sun. It presented an enormous crimson disk, pocked with spots of darkness. And the infrared predominated in its radiation. so that its dull light brought a sweltering heat.
Upon the summit of the rock, a cragged, stony shelf not fifty yards in length, were crowded one hundred men and women. Their bodies were slowly cooking under the unendurable rays of that slowly rising Sun. They were parched with thirst, for the ocean about them was an undrinkable acid brine. And they were coughing, strangling, weeping, gasping with respiratory distress. for the green in the air was free chlorine.
They were the hundred that the Basilisk had taken.
The last arrival, Jay Kalam, remembered hearing a sudden, queerly penetrating pur, as he stood in his chamber aboard the Inflexible. A resistless force dragged him into a frightful chasm of airless cold. But even before the breath could go out of him. light had come back—the dull, sinister radiation of this ancient star. The feral pur receded, and he found himself sprawling on this barren rock.
The chlorine burned his lungs. A savage gravitation dragged at his body. Heat struck him with a driving, blistering force. And he was sick with an utter hopelessness of despair. For what possible hope was offered now?
“Commander Kalam!” choked a voiceless voice. “You?”
It was Lars Eccard. the abducted chairman of the Green Hall Council, red-eyed and gasping, who aided him to his feet. He peered with smarting eyes about the bare summit of the rock, and saw many that he knew—even bent as they were with continual coughing, and masked with scraps of dampened rag tied over their nostrils, for some protection against the toxic gas.
He saw lean Bob Star. Captain Fayle, and a few other legionnaires who had been taken, standing on guard with their barytron blasters, at the ends of the rock. And beyond them, wheeling and soaring and diving in the poison yellow-green haze that hung upon the poison sea. he glimpsed a dozen living originals of the monstrous robot that had appeared in the Diamond Room.
“They have attacked many times, commander,” rasped Lars Eccard. beside him. “Thus far we have always beaten them off, but all the weapons are nearly dead.”
“I have my blaster.”
Jay Kalam touched his weapon, but the lean old statesman shook his head.
“It will help, commander,” he choked, “but not for long. For the tide is rising. Already, since the red dawn, it has come up the cliffs a hundred feet. Another hundred will cover the rock. And there are things in the water more deadly than those in the sky.”
Jay Kalam climbed a little higher on the rock, with Lars Eccard stumbling behind him. All of the haggard, white-masked faces that he saw were familiar to him. For these were the hundred foremost citizens of the System, snatched from their careers by the inexplicable power of the Basilisk.
In a wildly shrieking thing, bound with rags and struggling on the rock, he recognized the president of the great Martian university at Ekarhenium.
“He went mad,” gasped Lars Eccard. “He tried to leap from the cliffs. Perhaps we should have let him go.”
A woman lay on a little bench of rock. Improvised bandages covered her arms and shoulders. A small goldenhaired girl knelt beside her, sobbing. Her bandaged hand patted the child’s head.
“That is Robert Star’s wife,” said Lars Eccard. “One of the winged monsters snatched her up. She was almost beyond the cliffs, before Bob killed it.
It dropped her, and fell into the sea. The things that dragged it under the water were terrible indeed!”
A fit of coughing seized Jay Kalam. It left him breathless, trembling, blinded. His lungs were on fire. Lars Eccard tore a scrap off his tunic, and gave it Jo him.
“Wet this, commander,” he said. “Tie it around your face. Water absorbs chlorine. There would be no free chlorine here, a chemist told me, if the micro-organisms didn’t continually break down the chlorides in the sea.”
ON A HIGHER little plateau, they came upon a dozen men and women kneeling in a circle. All wore the rude masks, and one or another of them was always coughing. But they seemed to ignore the flesh-corroding death they breathed, and the black-winged death that wheeled and screamed above them, the crimson death of heat that beat down from the immense and lazy Sun. the manifold and hidden death beneath the acid, monster-infested sea that rose inexorably about the rock. Each had before him a little heap of pebbles, and their red, half-blinded eyes were upon a pair of dancing dice.
Lars Eccard looked down at them and shrugged.
“If it helps them to forget—”
Caspar Hannas was the banker at that game. His broad face, beneath its yellow-stained mask, showed a slow and senseless smile. And the same eagerness moved Ins great, white hands to draw in the pebbles he won, as if they had been diamond chips on the tables of his own New Moon.
John Comaine. the big blond engineer, did not play. He squatted across from Hannas. His long, square face had a wooden, impassive look, and his glassy, protruding eyes watched his old employer with what seemed a fixed and well-suppressed hostility. Beside him was the queer boxlike thing that he had set up on the New Moon to detect the mysterious agency of the Basilisk.
Amo Brelekko was rolling the dice. A white handkerchief covered half his face, but otherwise he. alone, seemed unchanged since the Diamond Room. His gaudy garments looked immaculate. The rays of the low red Sun splintered from his jewels. His thin, yellow hands manipulated the cubes with a deft and incredible skill.
But for all that skill, he rolled and lost. And the winner, whose thin, nervous hands snatched eagerly for the pebbles, was a little, gray wisp of a man whose slight, stooped figure seemed vaguely familiar. He set the play down in a little black book, and then tapped swiftly at the keys of a compact, silent little calculating machine. And suddenly Jay Kalam knew him. He was Abel Davian, the little gambler whom the Basilisk had taken from the New Moon’s Diamond Room.
The yellow-stamped moneybag, that must still hold the twenty million dollars of his fatal winnings, lay disregarded on the rock beside him. But he pushed out a little heap of black pebbles, and took the dice from Brelekko. Perspiration rolled from his shrunken skin, as he shook the cubes and threw. He lost, and bent again with a worried frown to his calculator.
“Strange animals, men,” muttered Lars Eccard.
Beyond, on the black rock’s highest pinnacle, they discovered John Star’s wife, Aladoree. She was kneeling, her proud, slight body shaken ever and again with paroxysms of dreadful coughing. Her quick hands were busy with some odd little instrument on the ledge before her, improvised from stray bits of wood and metal. Lean John Star was stooping beside her, an agony of sympathy beneath his mask, trying to help.
She looked up, and saw Jay Kalam. A weary little greeting smiled above her mask, and he saw a stubborn hope die in her eyes.
“We had hoped to see you, Jay,” came John Star’s voice, hoarse and strained. “—but on the Inflexible.”
JAY KALAM looked down at the crude simplicity of the incompleted instrument. There was a similarity to the tiny machine that he had seen obliterate the ancient Moon. This flimsy little toy, he knew, was the supreme weapon of mankind, capable of annihilating anything it was directed upon, even a-star; even, if its master willed, an entire galaxy.
He breathed the symbol of its dread power:
“AKKA?”
The mistress of it shook her delicate head.
“The instrument is incomplete. Jay,” her raw whisper came wearily. “The parts I have worn, disguised as jewels, have been taken from me. We haven’t found materials enough. I need wire for the coil.”
Jay Kalam fumbled for the small black disk of his ultrawave communicator.
“Perhaps the parts of this will help.”
“Perhaps.” The haggard woman took it from him. “But even if the instrument is completed.” her ragged whisper said. “I don’t see how it can serve us. For the Basilisk’s identity, and the seat of his strange power, are still unknown.
“We don’t even know where we are, not even the direction of our native Sun!”
“We can guess.” Jay Kalam told her. “We made a tentative identification of the star from which the Basilisk’s robot monster came. From the abundance of this free chlorine, and the appearance of the Sun above.—it is pretty obviously Type K9e—I believe that this is the same star. That means that our Sun is eighty light-years to southward. When night comes, so that we can see the constellations and the Milky Way—”
“When night comes.” John Star broke in huskily, “we won’t be here. From the weed and slime, it is evident that the tide floods this rock.”
“In that case—”
Jay Kalam choked and coughed. It was a long time before he could catch his strangly breath, and see again. He looked soberly, then, at the tortured man and the wan-faced woman before him. They were waiting, very grave.
“In that case.” he whispered again. “I see but one thing that we can do, it is very desperate, very uncertain. But it otters the only hope there is.”
“Jay—” John Star gulped. “Jay, you don’t mean—”
The grim dark eyes of the commander met the brave, patient eyes of Aladoree.
“If you can complete the instrument,” be told her quietly, “I think you must use it in a manner to destroy this Sun, this planet, everything in this System. Even ourselves.”
The woman’s fine head nodded gravely.
“I’ll do that,” she said. Her quick hands were turning the little disk of the communicator. “And the parts of this,” she told him, “will supply everything I need.”
“Wait.” croaked John Star’s tortured voice. “First—couldn’t we use it to report our position and our plight? There’s the legion—Hal and Giles—we might yet get help.”
The commander shook his head.
“This is just an ultrawave unit,” he said. “It would take eighty years for our call to reach the Sun. and eighty years for the answer to come back—and there would be no receiver sensitive enough to pick up the signals. The visi-wave, of course, is timeless—achronic. But even the visi-wave relay, that filled a whole room on the Inflexible, had a maximum theoretical range of less than half a light-year.
“No, John. I think our only hope is AKKA.”
The tine, deft hands of Aladoree were already unscrewing the thin black ease of the communicator, when:
Km! Krrr! Krrr!
The tiny piercing beat of the emergency call, stabbing from the instrument, made her drop it from her hands. Jay Kalam swiftly picked it up.
“G-39!” he gasped. “Who could be calling that?”
THE MUTED and distorted voice that he heard humming from the instrument, he knew at once for the voice of the Basilisk. It seemed to leer at him, thickened with an ineffable sardonic malice.
“My dear commander,” it said, “I must interfere with your valiant sacrificial scheme. For the quick death of AKKA is not the death I have planned for ninety-nine of you. I would have them live to feel my full revenge, for all the insults and injuries that have been heaped upon me. I would give them time to realize that the man they dealt with as the smallest and the meanest of mankind is now the greatest—the Basilisk. And when they have sensed the full truth, when their sufferings have made the fullest possible atonement. I would have them perish, not by AKKA, but in the manner that I shall ordain.
“And the hundredth man, commander.” that gloating whisper rasped, “must not die by AKKA. For I shall return him alive to the System, to tell mankind of my power and my revenge. You can assure your companions, commander—if you wish to revive their hopes—that one of them is destined to survive.”
The whisper ceased. Jay Kalam dropped the little instrument, and stared about the bare black rock. He saw the little circle of kneeling men and women, still intent upon their game of futile chance. He saw Bob Star’s wife, who had been Kay Nymidee, weakly rising, taking their sobbing little child into her arms. Saw Bob Star himself, a lean, lonely figure at the end of the rock, standing guard against the monstrous winged things that soared and dived upon the poison wind beyond.
“The Basilisk—” he was muttering. “His headquarters, his base . . . must be somewhere . . . out there. Relatively near. For his voice came by ultrawave, without any relay.”
The choked little gasp from Aladoree brought his eyes back to her haunted, stricken face. Her slender arm was pointing, trembling. And Jay Kalam saw that the half-completed instrument of AKKA was gone from the bench of rock before her. In its place was a little black serpent, crudely shaped of clay.
XVII.
“BUT I am not Luroa.”
The violet-eyed girl had closed the door of the tiny cabin upon the racing Phantom Atom, and the keen, endless whine of the hard-driven geodynes came but faintly to her and Giles Habibula.
“Eh, lass?” The old man blinked his colorless eyes. “But you are!”
Perched earnestly on the edge of the narrow bunk in front of him, for his mass overran the only chair, the girl flung back the lustrous mass of her platinum hair and looked gravely into the old soldier’s face.
“I’m no android, Giles Habibula,” she insisted, in a quick and anxious voice. “I’m as human as you are. I’m Stella Eleroid. I’m the daughter of Dr. Max Eleroid—who was murdered by the Basilisk.”
A cold light flashed in her violet eyes, and her white face was hardened with a grimness of purpose that seemed to freeze its beauty into marble.
“When I knew the legion had failed,” her low voice said, “I set out to track down his killer and to recover the geofractor—that was his last and greatest invention, the thing that Derron killed him for.”
“Geofractor?” echoed Giles Habibula. “What in life’s mortal name is that?” He lurched ponderously forward, his small eyes squinting into the girl’s face. “But you’re Luroa, lass!” he insisted. “I saw your blessed face on the notices of reward. There’s a difference in your eyes and your hair, and I’ll grant you to be a gorgeous actress—but you’ll never fool old Giles.”
“I can explain.”
With an impatient little gesture, the girl caught his massive shoulder. The old man looked into the white, tense beauty of her face, and all the doubt melted slowly from his seamed yellow features as he smiled.
“You see. Giles,” her swift voice said, “my father and Dr. Arrynu were boyhood friends. They roomed together at Ekarhenium. Each had a vast respect for the abilities of the other. My father used to say that if Arrynu had chosen to live within the law, he could have been the greatest biologist and the greatest artist in the System. Sometimes, during his long exile, Arrynu paid secret visits to the Earth, and my father always entertained him—I think he hoped to persuade Arrynu to give up his illicit researches and come back to help my father with his own experiments.
“Anyhow, on his last clandestine visit,” the girl said, “Arrynu met me. He had seen me before, when I was small. But now I was seventeen. And Arrynu made violent love to me. He was a vigorous and passionate man. The romance of his outlaw life intrigued me. He told me of the luxuries and the beauties of his stronghold on the uncharted asteroid. He begged me to return to it with him.
“And I would have gone.” The girl’s grave eyes looked beyond Giles Habibula. “I have sometimes wished that I had. Besides my father, Eldo Arrynu was the greatest man that I have known. I loved him—then.
“But I told my father, the evening before we were to leave. It was the only time I ever heard him curse. He called Arrynu names that should have shocked me. He told me all about the criminal side of Arrynu’s character—the illegal researches, the drug manufacture, the ring of desperate criminals that Arrynu gathered and subordinated to his ends.
Still, despite all that, I was mad enough to go. But then he told me about the androids, the lovely and soulless criminal slaves that Arrynu’s ring had sold through all the System, often to rob and murder their purchasers and be sold again.
“That convinced me. I refused to see Arrynu again. My father met him. I don’t know what happened. Dad must have threatened to expose him. But their strange friendship was ended. Arrynu returned to his hidden planetoid. I know now what he did.”
An old brooding horror darkened the eyes of the girl.
“Me made the thing he called Luroa. Her body had the superhuman strength of the androids. Her brain had all the inhuman, pitiless criminal cunning that he had given the brain of Stephen Orco. Bui she was modeled after me. From photographs and his own memory, he created a likeness almost exact.”
“Ah,” breathed Giles Habibula. “Ah, so! But, lass, how does it come that you have been playing the role of that mortal android?”
“Arrynu kept Luroa with him,” the girl said, “until the cometeers, guided by that monster he had made himself, fell upon his little secret world. Arrynu was killed. But Luroa escaped. Daring and brilliant and ruthless, she assumed leadership of the interplanetary gang. And her exploits presently got the legion on her trail. It was then that she conceived her most diabolical scheme.”
THE EYES of the girl were almost black, and she shuddered a little. Her hand groped for the great white jewel at her throat, as if it had been a precious talisman.
