“And one thing more, Jay—” The rugged face remained stiffly anxious.
“Bring Giles Habibula!”
“But he’s on Phobos,” protested the Commander, “and Mars is a hundred degrees past opposition.
It would take half a day to get him.
And I don’t see—”
“Call John Star,” begged the big Legionnaire, “and have him bring Giles to meet you.
Drunk or sober!
For we’ll need Giles, Jay, before this thing is done.
He’s getting old and fat, I know.
But he has a gift —a talent that we’ll need.”
“All right, Hal,” Jay Kalam nodded.
“I’ll bring Giles Habibula.”
“Thank you, Commander!”
It was the great hoarse voice of Caspar Hannas.
Into the visiwave plate, beside Hal Samdu’s unkempt head, the smooth white face of Hannas crowded, smiling idiotically.
“And—for Earth’s sake—hurry!”
Jay Kalam put through his call to Phobos by ultrawave—the faster visiwave equipment, still experimental, had not yet been installed there.
He ordered the Inflexible—powerful sister ship of the murdered Invincible—made ready to take off.
He was on his feet, to leave the office, when he saw the little clay serpent.
It lay on the thick green sheaf of the report that he had been working over a few minutes before.
And, beneath it, was a folded square of heavy, bright-red paper.
“Huh!”
His breath caught sharply.
Now how did that come here?
He looked quickly around the room.
The heavy door was still closed, the orderly sitting watchful and undisturbed beyond its vitrilith panel.
The windows were still secure, the grates over the air ducts intact.
“It couldn’t—”
Certainly he had seen no movement, heard no footsteps.
The Cometeers had known invisibility, but even an invisible man must have opened a door or a window.
Baffled, aware of a cold prickling touch of dread, he shook his head and picked up the serpent.
That was crude enough.
A roughly molded little figurine, burned black.
It lay in a double coil, head across the tail, so that it formed the letter B.
Where had it come from?
Then delicate hands trembling a little, he unfolded the heavy red sheet.
The impression of a black serpent, at the top of it, formed another B.
Beneath it, in a black script precise as engraving—the ink still damp enough to blot his fingers—was written:
My Dear Kalam:
Since you are going out to the New Moon, will you kindly take Caspar Hannas a message from me?
Will you tell him that nothing—not even the protection of the Legion of Space—will protect his most fortunate patron, every day, from the fate of Clovis Field?
The Basilisk
4 The Pawn of Malice
The Solar System is curiously flat.
The two dimensions of the ecliptic plane are relatively crowded with worlds and their satellites, and the cosmic debris of meteors, asteroids, and comets.
But the third is empty.
Outbound interplanetary traffic, by an ancient rule of the space-ways, arches a little to northward of the ecliptic plane, inbound, a little to the southward, to avoid both the debris of the system and danger of head-on collisions.
Beyond these charted lanes, there is nothing.
A tiny ship, however, was now driving outward from the sun, parallel to the ecliptic plane and two hundred million miles beyond the limits of the space-lanes.
Its hull was covered with thin photo-electronic cells capable of being adjusted to absorb any desired fraction of the incident radiation—making the vessel, when they were in operation, virtually invisible in space.