Collected Short Fiction, page 341
EERILY, this room was also empty. Sweeping it with the muzzle of his blaster, Chan Derron shuddered. This mass of untended mechanism was somehow uncanny, as if it had been itself alive.
“The Basilisk is not here,” said Stella Eleroid. “I hardly expected him to be. But I believe I can operate the geofractor—I was my father’s assistant, until he decided the job was too dangerous. We can disconnect the remote control, and use the searcher beam to look for him.”
“Good,” Chan said. “I think I know where to look. Try the vicinity of the red star Ulnar XIV, about eighty light-years north. Here’s the location.”
He gave her the scrap of paper he had found in Hannas’ vault. She turned to the long maze of untended controls. She held hurried little conferences with Giles Habibula. And the old man waddled beside her up and down the corridors. His fat hands were as familiarly skillful, Chan thought, as if they had built everything they touched.
Gripping his blaster, peering this way and that, Chan kept an anxious watch. It began to seem to him that the humming emptiness of this space was more terrible than a horde of the Basilisk’s robots would have been—until he heard a familiar feral pur, and saw greenwinged horror flapping at the farther end of the long room.
This time he knew that the central crimson eye was a vulnerable point. His white ray flashed. The monster fell, sprawling weirdly over a bank of dials, before it could lift the legion-type blaster in its own green tentacles.
“Don’t worry,” Chan called to Giles and the girl. “I got it!”
But the violet eyes of Stella Eleroid were startled and grave.
“We had the remote control disconnected half an hour ago,” she told him. “The arrival of that monster means that the Basilisk has another geofractor—somewhere!” She shuddered. “You stopped the robot, but he may send us—something else!”
Chan Derron resumed his apprehensive watch. Another hour had gone, when:
“We’ve found it, Chan!” came the girl’s eager voice. Her eyes were fixed upon a tiny, shielded screen in a little oblong control box. “The place where the geofractors must have been built. It’s on a great planet that circles the red star. In the middle of a high polar plateau, there’s a clearing in the jungle. Mines. Furnace stacks. Metal roofs of factories. The foundation, miles long, where the geofractors must have been built. A sort of robot city. I see thousands of the winged robots, wheeling about. Some of them fighting, I think, with their real-life originals at the edge of the jungle. The Basilisk must have begun by building robots, and setting them to build others—”
“But the Basilisk, lass?” broke in the nasal wheeze of Giles Habibula. “Where’s the mortal Basilisk?”
Stella Eleroid shook her platinum head—which was real, Chan wondered briefly: the blond curls and violet eyes of Vanya Eloyan, or the red-mahogany hair and gray-green eyes of the reward poster of Luroa?
“There’s no human being here,” she said. “Nothing but the robots.”
“Search, lass,” urged Giles Habibula. “The criminal must be somewhere. And all those he has abducted with his fearful power—or their poor remains.”
CHAN DERRON stood his endless watch. The girl moved delicate controls and looked into the small black box until:
“Here!” she cried abruptly. “There was a shadow on this ocean, that it took all our power to pierce. Beneath is a tiny rock, and there are people on it! Their faces are masked. They are coughing. A ragged, pitiful lot. The water seems to be rising. They are struggling, even fighting, for higher places on the rock. Things like the robot are wheeling over them. And great black, armored things are leaping out of the rising sea.”
Giles Habibula was blinking intently over her shoulder.
“Ah, so!” he breathed. “These are the luckless victims of the Basilisk. There’s Kay—poor lass, she’s all bandaged! There’s her child—and Bob!” His thin voice became a sort of wail.
“There’s Aladoree—ah, and the darling is ill! Unconscious, it looks. And John Star lifting her to a higher point. Ah, frightful death is hovering near them all!”
He caught a sobbing breath.
“Ave, and now I see those three scoundrels from the New Moon. Hannas and Brelekko and John Comaine. They are playing some game of dice—all but Comaine. And the little gambler. Abel Davian, is with them—still with his book and his mortal calculator. Playing their blessed lives away, for pebbles, while bloody death creeps down upon them!”
His quivering fingers caught the girl’s arm.
“You must set them back on earth with this machine,” he gasped. “And blessed quickly—before they perish.”
But she shook her head.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “The shadow over the rock was made by some instrument like that in my jewel. The Basilisk has protected it. Only the full power of the searcher beam can penetrate the barrier. Our fields can’t reach through and lift them away—not even one of them.”
Chan Derron was beside her, breathless.
“Then, Stella,” he demanded, “can you set me on the rock?”
“No,” she told him. “The barrier zone would interfere with that, too. But why?”
His dark-stained eyes were narrowed and grim.
“I think the Basilisk is there,” he said, “among them. I am going after him. If you can’t put me on the rock, drop me as near as you can.”
“In that dreadful sea?” Her eyes were wide with alarm. “Chan, you’ll be killed!”
“Thanks, Stella!” He grinned at her, very briefly. “But I’ve got a clue to the Basilisk’s identity. I’m going to test it. And there’s no time to lose! Will you help me?”
“I’ll help you, Chan.” A brief light shone in her eyes, and was extinguished with dread. “Go to the other end of the room,” she told him. “Beyond the shield of my jewel. And farewell, Chan Derron!” Her voice caught. “I . . . I believe you, now. If you come back—”
But he was already striding away.
“Aye, farewell,” Giles Habibula called after him, “grandson!”
At the other end of the long, dim-lit control room. Chan Derron paused and turned. He raised his head. The girl looked at him a moment, and then turned very suddenly to the little box beside her.
A savage, penetrating pur throbbed through all Chan’s body. The girl and old Habibula and the strange room were all whipped away. He was flung through frigid blackness, into a world of yellow-green mist.
GREENWINGED horror flapped and screamed beside him. He fell through the haze, toward the dark, flat sea where greater black monsters leaped above the slime. The geopeller checked his fall. But he dived. Something attacked him, beneath the water, and the bolt from his blaster made a volcano of steam. He climbed the flooded rock, and clambered out of the water with green slime dripping from his silver armor.
The rock’s highest point now stood not five feet above the tide. And the dark water visibly lapped upward. There were less than a hundred now upon the rock. And soon, he knew, there would be none.
He knew most of the masked, strangling, heat-parched human things that clung to the rock. But they paid him little heed. Most of them were too far gone for recognition. Commander Kalam saw him. and flung a barytron blaster upon him.
“The Basilisk!” he cried. “He’s come to mock us. Kill him!”
But his cry was only a gasping sob, that went unheard. And his blaster, exhausted with firing at the winged things above, flickered harmlessly and died.
“I think the Basilisk is here, commander,” said Chan. “And I have come to look for him.” He thrust his own blaster into Jay Kalam’s hands. “Take it,” he said, “and guard Aladoree. I am going to make a test.”
Stripping off the metal gloves of his space armor, he flung them down upon the rock and picked tip a handful of small black pebbles. He strode onto the level ledge, where Hannas and Brelekko and little Abel Davian and a few other masked, strangling men and women still knelt about their game, while John Comaine looked on with an expression of stolid hostility from beside his strange black box.
Chan Derron dropped on his knees, beside gaunt Brelekko, and heaped his pebbles before him.
“I’ve come to join your game,” he said.
The yellow, bright-ringed claw of Brelekko shook the dice and rolled them. He said nothing. But Gaspar Hannas, smiling behind his bandage the senseless smile that was the only smile upon the rock, gasped hoarsely:
“Welcome, stranger. But our game will soon be ended. Soon we’ll all be dead—all but one. That is the greatest gamble. For the Basilisk has promised that one of us will be returned alive to the System.”
“One of you,” Chan agreed. “But it’s no gamble. Because that one is the Basilisk himself!”
Gaspar Hannas gulped and stared.
“He couldn’t be—He wouldn’t—”
“He could be,” Chan said. “If he has the twisted, sadistic mind that he has displayed times enough before, he would. I think he is. But let us play. And will you ask Dr. Comaine to join us?”
Hannas made a gasping grunt at John Comaine. The big engineer nodded sullenly. Stiffly awkward, he rose from beside his instrument, and came unwillingly to kneel in the circle.
Chan took the dice from the talons of Brelekko, and rolled a seven. Raking in the pebbles he had won, he brushed the fingers of Hannas and Brelekko. He lost, and put the dice in the hand of Abel Davian—and watched that lean gray hand with narrowed eyes.
The little man was tapping the keys of his silent calculator again, when Chan saw the angry red welts lifting on his fingers. A chorus of muted screams, torn by terror from gas-seared throats, drew his eyes upward. And he saw the geofractor.
Or the twin colossal instrument! Miles long, dead-black globes of force bound with cyclopean metal rings, it eclipsed the enormous dull-red Sun. And it was falling!
Swiftly it seemed to expand. Chan knew it would crush the rock, and all upon it, into the deadly acid sea. And he heard again, beneath the screams, the mighty pur of the Basilisk’s sinister power.
“Wait!”
HIS GREAT hand snatched the little black calculating machine out of Abel Davian’s swelling fingers. He smashed it against the rock, seized a fragment of stone and pounded it to scrap and dust.
“What, sir?” The little gambler blinked bewilderedly at him through thick lenses. “What are you doing?”
“Conducting an allergic sensitivity test,” Chan rapped at him.
“I don’t understand you, sir!”
Chan glanced up at the stupendous shape of the falling geofractor, about at the appalled, hushed scores upon the rock. They awaited its impact, he thought, almost with gratitude.
“We’ve probably two minutes,” he said. “You see,” he told Abel Davian, “when I helped Dr. Eleroid’s disguised pseudo-assistant carry the model geofractor down into that armored chamber, it happened that my hand touched his. I saw rapid red swellings come upon his fingers, saw that he sneezed.”
His darkened eyes stabbed into the little gray man.
“When I learned how the crime was carried out, I happened to remember that you began to sneeze as you came toward me in the Diamond Room, just before you vanished—and already I had wondered how you had the audacity to win, on that particular night, or had the peculiar skill required, and wondered about the possible utilities of your portable calculator.”
Rigid, pallid, Abel Davian was staring at him.
“I contrived to touch your hands, just now,” Chan’s swift, grim voice went on. “And I observe that again you manifest an extreme allergic susceptibility to my body. It is a rare but proven phenomenon—the proteids of one human body acting as allergens to another. Its very rarity made the identification positive—even before I had checked it by proving that your little calculating machine was the remote-control box of the geofractors, Mr. Basilisk!”
Ashen, palsied, the little man was cowering back from him. His pale, hunted eyes flashed up at the mass of the falling geofractor, that now spanned half the greenish sky. They came back to Chan, magnified by the thick lenses, lurid with a triumphant hatred.
“What if I am the Basilisk?” his cracked voice snarled defiantly. “I’ll still be the winner—because you all will die!” His feral eyes flickered over the rock. “Hannas and Comaine and Brelekko, because they robbed me, on the New Moon, for twenty years. Kalam—because the legion stopped my robot experiments, and gave me three years, as Dr. Enos Clagg, on the Devil’s Rock. The Green Hall Council—because my true name is Abel Ulnar!” His thin shoulders drew up with a supercilious pride. “I’m Eric Ulnar’s son. But for you, Derron”—his voice was savage with an arrogant malice—”you, grandson of old Giles Habibula, who with John Star and Aladoree caused my father’s death—but for you, the Basilisk would have restored the empire! I should have been Abel I.” His thin lips drew to a venomous line. “But even yet you all shall die!”
His glaring eyes lifted again to the colossal falling machine. Now its black mass idled the sky, almost from horizon to horizon. A fantastic greenish twilight was falling fast upon the rock. The first faint wind of compression blew down upon them.
“I think not,” said Chan Derron’s swift, hard voice. “For the daughter of Dr. Eleroid is at the controls of the other geofractor. And I think we shall escape the fall of this geofractor as you intended to. Mr. Basilisk. Already you see. Aladoree and many of the rest have been set hack in the System!”
All the rock was trembling to a mighty purring sound. And by little groups, the parched and masked and haggard victims of the Basilisk were vanishing from the flooded rock. Familiar articles of furniture, hits of shrubbery and sod, proved that they had been returned to their own kinder world. In a few moments Chan was standing alone before the other man, beneath the many million tons of the falling geofractor.
“But I don’t think that you’ll escape. Mr. Basilisk.” His hand made a gesture of farewell. “Because Stella Eleroid knows certainly, by now, that you—and not I—are the murderer of her father.”
Then a deeper throbbing penetrated all Chan’s body. Some pellucid screen, it seemed, had fallen between his eyes and the gray, stricken face of Abel Davian. The green, thickening twilight became a total darkness. And he knew that Stella Eleroid had lifted him from the peril of the rock.
THE END.
Passage to Saturn
An Interplanetary Outlaw Escapes the Death Block and Heads for the Grim Kappa Space-From Which There Is No Escape!
FROM the first shocking glimpse of him, I knew that the man was dangerous. We were four hours and a million miles off the Moon, when an unfamiliar gruffness of the voice in my co-pilot’s phone brought me uneasily aft from the little space shell’s pilot cuddy of the Swallow. Awaiting me in the power turret, I found the stranger. A bright omeganode gun leaped in his lean hand to menace me. “Steady, Kane!” The hard, level voice rasped from his motionless, red-bearded lips. “You’ve got a new copilot out to Saturn.”
My own omega beam projector was clipped in its place on the bulkhead back in the pilot cuddy. The swift little “jeep” carried two men only, and I had already made five hops to Titan (for Jado station was upon that great satellite of Saturn) with loyal and trusted Victor Mohr.
“How—” I was stunned, breathless.
“How did you—”
The stranger grinned at me, darkly. His deep-tanned face was haggard. A neglected stubble of wiry bronze beard gleamed on it, in odd contrast to the stiff blackness of his heavy eyebrows and unkempt hair. A black patch covered one eye. The other, bloodshot with fatigue or drugs, was narrowed and dark with a ruthless desperation.
“I simply walked aboard.” His voice was calm and immensely deep. “While you were making your tearful farewell to old Doc Jollabard.”
“Eh?” My eyes left the menace of his gun, to search among the tiered Pitcairn cells, the quick snaky black quadraxial cables, the crowded bulky transformers and massive humming rotors, for Mohr. “Where’s my copilot?” Alarm choked me. “What—have you done to Mohr?”
That deadly silver muzzle lifted carelessly.
“Forget your buddy, Kane,” came the rumbling voice from that grim, rigid mask of a face. “He’s all right—back in Tycho Station, behind a pier at the edge of the dome. He’ll be coming safely out of the lethoid cone I tossed at him, by now.”
I STARED at the well adjusted, quietly humming delta-field rotors, my respect for the stranger vastly increased.
“Yes, I’m qualified to take Mohr’s place.” The ominous lone dark eye had read my mind. “Or, for that matter, Captain—yours!”
I was groping for his identity. Stellar Express was new. The great rocket liners had been plowing the void for two centuries. But it was just thirteen years since Doc Jollabard had sent the first successful momentum-field jeep out to Jupiter.
Working from the tenet of quantum mechanics that the canceled wave fields of every electron pervade the entire Universe, Doc Jollabard was able, by inversion of electric magnetic fields to form his delta-field, to create momentum and velocity through direction reaction of energy on the warp of space. Thus, the jeep, in a sense, lifted itself by its own bootstraps.
When it accelerated, energy was expended by the rotors to build up the delta-field. In decelerating, the rotors absorbed the energy of the field as they damped it out, recharging the Pitcairn accumulators. Total power loss, from battery to momentum field, was about eight percent. Hence, the Jollabard space flier had an efficiency of twelve hundred percent, against the forty or fifty percent of the best rockets.
But not a hundred men had ever been trained to master, or even understand, the delicate controls of the Jollabard jeeps. Which, out of that small group, was this man?
I stared at the giant’s black radiation-cloak, his black hair, the black eye-patch. Black! My memory stirred, recalling a scrap of news that I had seen on the telescreen back at Tycho Dome.
Black Kell Killahin had escaped in a rocket sled! Notorious space pirate, he had lain four years in the death block of the prison of the Interplanetary Commerce Commission, at Kenya City, Africa, while lawyers squabbled over division of his recaptured loot. In the rocket sled he had commandeered, it was just possible that a man of Black Kell’s metal could have flown from Africa to the Moon. He had been an earlier Jollabard man.
