I didn’t take his invention.
My conviction was unjust.
I’ve been the victim of something—monstrous!
Believe me, Vanya—”
Her eyes glinted with the chill of a polar dusk.
“I don’t believe you, Chan Derron.”
Her low voice rang with a deadly resolution.
“And you won’t escape until I know what you have done—what you are doing—with Dr. Eleroid’s secret.”
The desperate, ruthless intensity of her ready poise and her searching face made her seem to Chan the most terrible but yet the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
And suddenly he was startled by some mocking familiarity.
“Remember, Chan Derron,” her cold voice warned him, “with two words I can end your life tonight—and the amazing career of the Basilisk!”
Chan Derron drew a long uneven breath, and settled slowly back in his chair.
He was staring at the figure of white loveliness across the table.
He stared while a silent waiter brought their food, and silently departed.
And the thing he saw was more alarming than her icy threat.
For the make-up on her perfect face had dissolved and shifted. Her violet eyes in his mind, had turned a clear ice-green.
The platinum splendor of her hair had become a glory of red-lit mahogany.
Yes, indeed, he knew her face!
He had studied every feature of it, for lonely hours, on the picture posted beside his own on the bulkhead of the Phantom Atom.
This splendid and deadly being was no woman!
She was Luroa, the last survivor of Eldo Arrynu’s synthetic android monsters.
The price on her life matched that on his own.
Chan Derron smiled gently, and eased the dark glasses on his face.
“You know two words,” he whispered softly.
“But I know one— Luroa.”
There was a flicker of white tension on her face, he thought. The flash of something dark and deadly in the deep pools of her eyes. But in another instant she was smiling at him radiantly.
“The food, Dr. Charles,” she said, “is too good to be neglected— and we must be in the Diamond Room before midnight.”
When they were in the gaming room, the girl bought a stack of chips—displaying a sheaf of green certificates that seemed to speak of the sinister skills of Luroa.
They played, he placing the chips at her direction. And they won.
Perhaps, Chan thought—he had few illusions about the role of chance at the New Moon’s tables—because the magnet of her beauty always crowded the table where she played.
Her violet eyes were watching him very closely, he could tell, and seeing all that happened about them, and measuring the minutes that fled.
She was waiting, he realized, for midnight—and for him to betray himself as the Basilisk.
“Vanya,” he whispered once, when they had a moment alone, “I only came here to hunt this criminal.
If you’ll let me—”
“Wait,” she returned inexorably, “until midnight.”
When the three Legionnaires came upon them, Chan Derron recognized the Commander and Hal Samdu at once.
Even in plain clothes, they were unmistakable to any veteran of the Legion.
For a little time he put hope in his disguise—fervidly regretting that he had not been six inches shorter.
The return of his check and keys, however, by Jay Kalam, convinced him that he had been identified—and that the short fat man’s spectacular maneuvers had been no more than an elaborate accompaniment to the picking of his pocket.
It surprised him that the girl spoke so promptly in his defense.
His sense of her surpassing beauty kept rising above his fear of her— even above his cold instinctive horror of the android.
When the Commander had gone, he turned to her with a little smile of relief, and gratitude.
“Thank you, Vanya.”
Her smile of response was breath-taking—but all intended, he swiftly realized, for the spectators.
For her golden voice dropped softer than a whisper; pitilessly cold, it rang ominously in his ear:
“No thanks are due me, Chan Derron.
Kalam and Samdu and old Habibula know you as well as I do—and my identification meant nothing to them.
They are just waiting—as I am—for midnight.”
And midnight came.
The girl, as the moment stalked upon them, had gripped Chan’s arm.