One Against the Legion Read online

“Until I began seeing my face on all the telescreens! Wanted for another killing—”

  He shrugged heavily. “That murdered guard at the Terrestrial Bank, with my face on the film of his gun-camera—I don’t know how you did it.

  “But isn’t all that enough?”

  Choking back the useless words, he stared around the pilot bay again. He was alone.

  There was only the automatic pilot, clucking softly now and then as it set the cruiser back on course, and the silent serpent of black clay lying on that thick red sheet, and the cold feel of mocking eyes upon him.

  “All right, Mr. Basilisk!”

  He snatched the serpent, suddenly, and hurled it to shatter into black fragments on the deck. A savage anger took his breath and shook his limbs and roared in his ears.

  “Look out!” He gasped harshly. “Because I’m through running away. I don’t quite know what I can do—or how—against you and all the Legion. But—look out!”

  He stopped the geodynes, and swung grimly to the chart cabinet. The view-plate showed him the greenish point of Earth, and presently the silver atom of the New Moon beside it. He read its position on the calibrated screen, and turned to the calculator to set up his first hopeless move against his unknown tormentor.

  5

  ‘At the Blue Unicorn—’

  The mighty Inflexible slipped gently into a berth against one of the six vast tubular arms of the New Moon’s structure. Massive keys locked her trim hundred thousand tons of fighting strength into position.

  Her valves opened, to communicate with the artificial satellite.

  Three men hi plain clothes were sitting at a table in a long, richly simple chamber hidden aft the chart-room of the flagship. The slender man had chosen conservatively dark, exquisitely tailored civilian garb. The white-haired, rugged faced giant had attired himself hi lustrous silks that reflected every bright hue of the New Moon’s mirrors; he had left behind his tinkling sheaf of medals with a visible reluctance. The careless gray cloak of the third fell loose on his short but massive figure; a heavy cane was gripped in his pudgy yellow hand.

  “For life’s sake, Jay, what’s the mortal haste?” The round, blue-nosed face of Giles Habibula looked imploringly at the tall Commander. “Here we’ve just sat down to get our precious breath, after that frightful dash across the void of space. We’ve had but a whiff of dinner, Jay. And now you say that we must go!”

  Great Hal Samdu looked at him grimly.

  “The dashing could have harmed you little, Giles,” he rumbled, “when you were fast in a drunken sleep. And if you’ve had but a whiff of Jay’s good food—then a whole taste would founder a Venusian gorox!”

  Jay Kalam nodded gravely.

  “We’re at the New Moon, Giles. Caspar Hannas is waiting for us, at the valve. And we’ve a job to do.”

  Giles Habibula shook the wrinkled yellow sphere of his head, and turned fishy pleading eyes to the Commander.

  “I can’t stand it, Jay,” he whimpered. “It’s a turn I can’t endure.” He pointed a trembling yellow thumb at his protruding middle. “Look at Giles Habibula. He’s an old, old man, Giles is. He must ration his precious wine. He must have a cane to aid his limping step. He’ll be dead soon, Giles will.”

  The pale eyes blinked.

  “Ah, so, dead—unless the scientists come at the secret of rejuvenation. And precious soon!

  There’s a specialist, Jay, on this very New Moon, whose advertising promised that—but John Star wouldn’t let me come!”

  He sighed, sadly.

  “Aye, the whole world plots for the death of poor old Giles. Look at him, Jay. He was drinking up his last miserable drop of happiness at the Purple Hall. For Phobos is a pleasant world, Jay.

  The sun in its gardens is kind to the aches in an old man’s bones.

  John Star is a generous host—not always rushing famished guests away from his table, Jay!

  “Ah, and it’s a comfort to see Aladoree every day—to see her so happy with John Star, Jay, after all the fearful dangers they’ve come through. A comfort to be near, to guard her, if trouble comes again.”

  His seamed face smiled a little.

  “It gives a lonely, friendless old soldier a tiny mite of happiness, Jay, to dandle Bob Star’s daughter on his knee. And to see Kay herself still so lovely, after all the horror of the comet, and so eager for Bob’s visits home. The next one, the doctors say, is sure to be a son —but that’s a secret, Jay!”

  Leaning heavily back in his chair, the old man sighed again.

  “Old Giles was happy on Phobos, Jay—happy as the shattered wreck of a dying Legionnaire can be. He had his bit of supper, amid the dear familiar faces. He sipped his precious drop of wine. He dozed quietly away—ah, so, and it might have been into a poor old soldier’s well earned last repose! But—no!”

  His pale eyes stared accusingly.

  “He wakes up in a strange cramped bunk. And he finds he is upon a cruiser of the Legion, shrieking through the frigid gulf of space. Ah, Jay, and his dimming old senses feel the shadow of a frightful danger, rushing down upon him! That’s an evil way to serve a defenseless old man, Jay, in his miserable sleep. The shock might stop his heart!”

  His fat hands clutched the edges of the table.

  “ ‘Tis a fearful thing, Jay, to alarm folks so! Ah, it made me think of the Medusae.

  And that evil man-thing Oreo, and the fearful Cometeers.” He leaned forward, earnestly. “Tell old Giles there’s no alarm, Jay! Tell him it’s only a monstrous joke.”

  His small eyes looked anxiously back and forth, between the grave face of Jay Kalam, and the grimly rugged one of Hal Samdu. His wrinkled face faded slowly, to a paler, sickly yellow.

  “Life’s name!” he gasped. “Can the thing be so mortal serious? Speak, Jay! Tell old Giles the truth, before his poor brain cracks.”

  Rising beside the table, Jay Kalam shook his head.

  “There’s little enough to tell, Giles,” he said. “We have to deal with a criminal, who calls himself the Basilisk. He has got some uncanny mastery of space, so that distance and material barriers apparently mean nothing to him.

  “He began hi a small way, nearly two years ago. Taking things from secure places.

  Putting notes and his little clay snakes in impossible places—I recently received one in my office in the Green Hall.

  “He keeps attempting something bigger. There have been murders. Now he has served notice that he is going to rob and murder one of the New Moon’s patrons, every day. If he goes on—well, Hal is afraid—”

  “Afraid?”

  Hal Samdu crushed a great fist into the palm of his hand, and towered to his feet.

  “Afraid,” he rumbled. “Aye, Giles, I’m sick and cold with fear. For if this goes on, the Basilisk can take the keeper of the peace as easily as any luckless gambler—”

  “The keeper?” In his own turn, lifting himself with the table and his cane, Giles Habibula heaved anxiously to his feet. His pale eyes blinked at Jay Kalam. “Then why can’t she use—AKKA?” His voice had dropped, almost reverently, as he spoke those symbolic letters.

  “And so end the danger?”

  The Commander’s dark head shook regretfully.

  “Because we don’t know who the Basilisk is, Giles,” he said. “Or where. Aladoree can’t use her weapon, without a target to train it on. If we can ever discover the precise location of the Basilisk hi space —before he takes her—that is all we need to know.”

  “Aye, Giles,” Hal Samdu rumbled urgently. “And that is why we sent for you. For you have a gift for opening locks, and discovering hidden things.”

  Giles Habibula inflated himself.

  “Ah, so, Hal,” he wheezed. “Old Giles had a spark of genius once —a precious glow of talent that has twice saved the System. And little thanks he got for the saving of it.

  Ah, once—but it’s rusted now. It is dying. Ah, Jay, you might better have left old Giles to his peaceful sleep on Phobos.”
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  His small eyes were blinking at them, swiftly.

  “But we must seek the identity of this master of crime. Have you no clue, Jay? No precious clue at all?”

  “Aye, Giles,” broke in Hal Samdu again. “We’ve clues enough. Or too many. And they all tell the same story. The Basilisk is the convict, Derron.”

  “Derron?” wheezed Giles Habibula. “I’ve heard the name.”

  “A captain in the Legion,” Jay Kalam told him, “Chan Derron was convicted of the murder of Dr. Max Eleroid and suspected of the theft of a mysterious device invented as a weapon for use against the Cometeers. The model was never recovered. Derron escaped from the prison on Ebron, two years ago. The activities of the Basilisk began soon after.”

  A green light blinked above the door.

  “The orderly,” Jay Kalam said. “We must go. Caspar Hannas is expecting us, and we’ve only two hours.”

  “Two hours!” gasped Giles Habibula. “Jay, you speak as if we were condemned and wailing to die.”

  “It’s two hours until midnight, New Moon time,” Jay Kalam explained. “That is when this criminal has promised to appear—and we may have a chance to trap him.”

  Giles Habibula squirmed uneasily. “How do you hope to do that?”

  “We are taking steps,” Jay Kalam answered. “First, the ten cruisers of Hal’s fleet are on guard against the approach of any strange ship. Second, within the New Moon, Gaspar Hannas has promised the full cooperation of his special police—they’ll be on duty everywhere. Third, we will be waiting within the New Moon ourselves, with a score of Legion men in plain clothes.”

  “It is this man Derron, that we must take,” grimly added Hal Samdu. “There’s evidence enough that he’s the one we want. Gaspar Hannas has raised the reward for him to a quarter of a million.

  We’ve papered all the New Moon with his likeness. The guards, and the players, too, will be alert. If he comes here tonight, we’ll get him!”

  “Ah, so, Hal!” wheezed Giles Habibula. “But if all you’ve told me is true—if distance and walls mean nothing to this strange power with which the Basilisk is armed—then perhaps he can strike down the poor gambler without coming here himself.”

  “Anyhow—” and Jay Kalam beckoned toward the door where the green light was blinking still—“we must go. If he comes, we may take him. If he doesn’t, we may still discover some clue.

  Anything—”

  His lean jaw set.

  “Anything to tell us where he is, so that he can be destroyed.”

  Gigantic Hal Samdu stalking ahead, Giles Habibula waddling and purring and laboring with his cane behind, they went out of the Commander’s apartment, out through the chart room and the great armored valves of the Inflexible , into the New Moon.

  Gaspar Hannas met them. Huge as Hal Samdu, he was dressed in loose flowing black.

  The black emphasized the whiteness of his monstrous soft-fleshed hands and his vast smooth face. His black, deepset eyes were distended and darting with fear. Sweat shone on his forehead and his white bald head. But his blank face greeted them with its slow and idiotic grin.

  “Gentlemen!” he gasped hoarsely. “Commander! We must hasten. Time draws short.

  The guards are posted, and I’ve been waiting—”

  His voice choked off, abruptly, and he started back from Giles Habibula. Leaning heavily on his cane, the old man was peering at him. The old soldier’s yellow face broke into a wondering grin.

  “In life’s name!” he wheezed. “It’s Pedro the Shar—”

  The mindless smile congealed on the white lax face of Caspar Hannas, and his huge hands made a frightened gesture for silence. His eyes swept the fat man swaying on the cane, and he whispered hoarsely: “Habibula. It’s been fifty years. But I know you. You’re Giles the Gh—”

  “Stop!” gasped Giles Habibula. “For I know you—Caspar Hannas—in spite of your artificial face. And I’ve more on you than you do on me. So you had better hold your mortal tongue!”

  He steadied himself, with both hands on the cane, and his pale eyes blinked at the giant in black.

  “Caspar Hannas!” he wheezed. “The great Caspar Hannas, the New Moon’s master!

  Well, you’ve come a long way, since the time of the Blue Unicorn. You must have eluded the posse hi the jungle—”

  The big man lifted his hand again, fearfully.

  “Wait, Habibula!” he gasped. “And forget—”

  “Ah, so, old Giles can forget—for a price.” The old man sighed. “Life has served us mortals different. Here you have made a mighty fortune. Men say the New Moon has made you the System’s richest man. Your poor old comrade is but a penniless veteran of the Legion, starved and friendless and ill.” He quivered to a sob. “Pity old Giles Habibula—”

  “In fifty years, you have not changed!” Admiration rang in the husky voice of Hannas. “What do you want?”

  The yellow face was suddenly beaming.

  “Ah, Mr. Hannas, you can trust the discretion of Giles Habibula! The luxury of your accommodations here is famous, Mr. Hannas. The excellence of your food. The vintages of your wines.”

  Caspar Hannas smiled his senseless smile.

  “You are the guests of the New Moon,” he said. “You and your comrades of the Legion. You shall have the best.”

  The fishy eyes of Giles Habibula blinked triumphantly at his companions.

  “Ah, thank you, Mr. Hannas!” he wheezed. “And I believe that duty is now carrying us into your salons of chance. It’s many a long year, Mr. Hannas, since old Giles risked a dollar for more than fun.

  But this meeting has brought the old days back, when the wheels of chance were meat and drink—aye, and life’s precious blood—“

  Caspar Hannas nodded, and his smile seemed to stiffen again.

  “I remember, Giles,” he said. “Too well. But come. We’ve no time to waste on games.” He looked at the old soldier again, and added reluctantly, “But if you really wish to play, the head croupier in the no-limit hall will give you a hundred blue chips.”

  “I, too, remember,” sighed Giles Habibula. “At the Blue Unicorn—”

  “Five hundred!” cried Caspar Hannas, hastily. “And let us go.”

  Jay Kalam nodded, and Hal Samdu stalked impatiently ahead.

  “Ah, so,” gasped Giles Habibula. “Post your guards. And set your traps. And let’s go on to the tables. Let your bright wheels turn, your precious blood race fast as the numbers fall.

  Let brain meet brain in the battle where wits are the victor. Ah, the breath of the old days is in my lungs again!” He waddled ponderously forward.

  “There’ll be no danger from this Chan Derron,” he wheezed hopefully. “There’s no human being—aye, none but old Giles Habibula himself—could pass Hal’s fleet and the New Moon’s walls and all these guards, to come here tonight.

  “And as for your precious Basilisk—I trust he’ll prove to be no more than some hoax—In life’s name, what was that ?”

  Some little dark object had fallen out of the air before him. It had struck the floor and shattered.

  From the fragments of it, however, he could see that it had been the small figurine of a serpent, crudely formed of black-burned clay.

  6

  ‘You’re Chan Derron!’

  The old Moon has been eclipsed two or three tunes a year, whenever the month-long circuit of its orbit carried it through the diminishing tip of Earth’s shadow cone. The New Moon, nearer the planet, plunged through a brief eclipse every six hours. Upon that fact, Chan Derron made his plan.

  During his strenuous years at the Legion academy, Chan had somehow found time for amateur theatricals. Often enough, in these last two fugitive years, his actor’s skill had served him well.

  And now he called upon it for a new identity.

  He became Dr. Charles Derrel, marine biologist, just returned from a benthosphere exploration of the polar seas of Venus, now hi search of recreation on the New Moon.

&
nbsp; His bronze hair was dyed black, his bronze-gray eyes darkened with a chemical stain, his tanned skin bleached to a Venusian pallor. A blue scar twisted his face, where the fangs of a sea-monster had torn it. He limped on the foot that a closing valve had crushed. His brown eyes squinted, against unfamiliar sun.

  “That will do.” He nodded at the stranger in the mirror. “If you ever get past the fleet and the guards.”

  Another bit of preparation, he took the geopeller unit out of a spare space suit and strapped it to his shoulders under his clothing. (The geopeller, invented by Max Eleroid, was a delicate miniature geodesic deflector, with its own atomic power pack. Little larger than a man’s hand, controlled from a spindle-shaped knob on a short cable, it converted an ordinary space suit into a complete geodesic ship. A tiny thing, yet already it had brought many a space-wrecked flier across a hundred million miles or more to safety.) The Phantom Atom drifted into the Earth’s shadow cone, beyond the old Moon’s orbit. It dropped inertly Earthward. Hal Samdu’s patrolling cruisers set red points to blazing on the detector screens, but they would not discover Chan so easily, for the few tons of his ship were as nothing, against their many thousands. And the powerful, ever-shifting gravitational, magnetic, and electrostatic fields of the Earth far reduced the sensitivity of any detector hi the planet’s close vicinity.

  The Earth grew beneath him. A great disk of denser darkness, it was ringed with supernal fire, where the atmosphere refracted the hidden sun’s rays into a wondrous circle that blazed with the red essence of all sunsets. The silvery web of the spinning sign slid into that ring and vanished in the dark.

  With a careful hand on the vernier-wheel, straining his eyes in the faint red dusk, Chan Derron found it again. He piloted the Phantom Atom to the motor-house that controlled a great flimsy mirror of sodium foil out at the rim of that vast wheel, and locked the ship against it with a magnetic anchor.

  Slipping into white, trim-fitting metal, Chan snapped his blaster to its belt, and went out through the valve. One bolt from his blaster severed the power leads. And he waited, at the mirror’s edge, until the sun came back. The great sheet burned with white fire, and the little ship behind it lay hidden in total darkness. But if the mirror turned—At last the technician arrived, sliding up a pilot wire from the metal star of the New Moon’s heart, carrying a kit of tools to repair the disabled unit. Gripping the control-spindle of the geopeller, Chan flung himself to meet him.