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 famt 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.
They sprawled together in space.
The technician, after his first surprise, displayed a wiry strength.
He groped for his atomic torch, that would have cut Chan’s armor like paper.
“I’ve got a blaster.”
Vibration of metal in furious contact carried Chan’s words.
“But I don’t want your life—only your number and your keys.”
“Derron!”
The man’s face went white within his helmet.
“The convict—we were warned.”
Chan grabbed for the torch.
But the fight had gone out of the other.
Limp with terror, he was gasping:
“For God’s sake, Derron, don’t kill me.
I’ll do anything you want!”
His name, it seemed to Chan, had grown stronger than his body!
And more dangerous than any enemy.
Swiftly, he took the prisoner’s tools, his work-sheet, his keys, and the number-plate—a black-stencilled yellow crescent—from his helmet.
With the man’s own torch, he welded the shoulder-piece of his armor to the motor-house.
“In three hours,” Chan promised, “I’ll be back, and let you go.”
He grasped a sliding ring on the pilot wire, and the geopeller sent him plunging down five hundred miles to the New Moon’s heart.
The wire brought him to a great platform, on one of the vast tubular arms of the central star.
He dropped amid half a score of other men, all with kits of tools, and hastened with them into a great air-valve.
His own face looked at him, from the wall of the valve. $250,000 REWARD! shrieked crimson letters. LOOK!
This man may be beside you—NOW!
At a wicket, as he filed with the others out of the valve, he turned in his captured work-sheet.
“Inspect and repair Mirror 17-B-285” was the order at its head.
He scrawled at the bottom of it, Defective switch located and repaired.
How long would he have, he wondered, before some other repairman, sent out to do a better job, would find the first welded to the motor-house beside the Phantom Atom?
But if he had won just three hours—
In the locker rooms, where the men were squirming out of their metal, hastening under the showers, gratefully donning their clothing, he saw that ominous poster again.
And all the talk he heard was of Chan Derron and the Basilisk, and whether the two could be the same, and whether the promised robbery and murder would be carried out at midnight.
Chan Derron found the locker to which his borrowed number corresponded.
He hung up his suit, hastily donned the somewhat-too-small lounging pajamas and loose cloak that he discovered there, and thrust himself into a group of tired men bound for home and supper.
“Keep yer optics hot,” advised a little mechanic beside him.
“Any big man you see tonight might be good for that quarter million.
You don’t know who—”