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.
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 spacewrecked 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.