His leaden eyes went back to the tall man strolling toward them.
Amo Brelekko was gaunt to the point of emaciation. His huge head was completely bald.
A long hatchet nose accented the knife-like sharpness of his face.
He now wore brilliant purple lounging pajamas, and a flaming yellow robe.
A great diamond pinned his tunic, and the lean yellow claws of his fingers were glittering with rings.
“Amo the Eel!” whispered Giles Habibula.
“You wouldn’t know that forty mortal years had gone.
He looks just the same.
He had the swiftest hands I ever knew—aye, beside my precious own!”
His pale eyes blinked shrewdly at the New Moon’s master.
“What is he doing here, Hannas?
You couldn’t let him play.
He knows your tricks as well as I do.”
The white giant smiled his silly smile.
“Brelekko has been here since the New Moon was built,” said Caspar Hannas.
“I offered him ten thousand dollars a day to play for the house.
He refused. He said that he would prefer to take his money from the other side of the table.
“And he does. But he is more moderate than you were, Habibula.
He limits his winnings scrupulously to ten thousand dollars a day.
I don’t regret his presence.
His spectacular methods of play make him a valuable advertisement.”
“Aye, he’d be good.” Giles Habibula nodded.
“Though he was only a youth when I knew him, he already showed a precious promise, in the quickness of his hands.”
“Brelekko is a gifted man,” agreed Gaspar Hannas.
“He’s a skilled amateur magician—sometimes he gives a special performance for our guests. His brain is as clever as his hands.
He invented the game of hyper-chess, and none can beat him at it.”
“I never tried,” muttered Giles Habibula.
“His suite is equipped as an astrophysical laboratory,” Hannas went on, “with an observatory dome outside, on the New Moon’s hull.
By avocation he is a brilliant scientist, by vocation the greatest gambler in the System—”
The leaden eye of Giles Habibula had begun to glitter.
“Except,” Caspar Hannas added very hastily, “of course, yourself.”
His great white hand beckoned, and Amo Brelekko came to meet them.
When his dark eyes found the waddling old man in gray, however, he stopped abruptly.
Gems glittered in a sudden arc, as his lean hand flashed toward his arm-pit. But the thick cane of Giles Habibula was first. It snapped up level with the gaunt body of Amo Brelekko, and his yellow hand tensed on the head.
“Still, Brelekko!” His thin voice rang cold with menace.
“Or I’ll burn you in two.”
As the jeweled hand dropped, his voice softened.
“Ah, me, Brelekko,” he wheezed, “after forty years, can’t we forget?”
“I’ll never forget, Habibula.”
The speech of Brelekko was a voiceless rasping.
“Not in forty centuries!”
“Then you had best restrain yourself, Amo,” advised Giles Habibula, grimly.
“At least until midnight has passed.”
The fleshless, cadaverous face of the gambler made an unpleasant grimace.
“So you are here to hunt the Basilisk, Habibula?” his rasping whisper asked.
“There’s an ancient Terrestrial proverb,
‘Set a thief to catch a thief.’” His laugh was queerly muted like his voice, a kind of chuckling hiss.
“But I think even that will fail.
For the Basilisk is a better thief than you ever were, Habibula.”
Giles Habibula caught a choking breath, and the cane lifted swiftly.