Her small fingers sank desperately into his flesh—as strong, he thought, as an android’s must be.
And her keen violet eyes were watching every move he made, he knew, as sharply as he watched the promised victim of the Basilisk—gray, tattered, trembling little Abel Davian.
Her other hand, he noticed, and wondered at it, was toying constantly with the great white jewel at her throat.
What manner of jewel, he was asking himself in that final moment, was huge gem that had the prismatic sheen and the intricate hexagonal perfection of a great snowflake?
Chan Derron heard that hideous, feral purring.
He saw little Davian flicker, grow queerly rigid—and saw that he was gone.
He felt a breath of dank and ice-cold air.
He was flung toward the spot where Davian had been, and dragged instantly back.
Then—hardly aware that he was strangling to a whiff of some choking, acrid gas—he was staring with bewildered and incredulous eyes at the monstrous thing that had appeared in Davian’s place.
It was like nothing men had found in all the System.
Standing on three thin, swaying, rubbery-looking legs, it reared twelve feet Mgh.
Queerly teardrop-shaped, its body was covered with close-set, green-black scales.
Three huge eyes, of a dull and lurid crimson, glared from its armored head.
Its enormous, jet-black beak yawned open to reveal multiple rows of saber-like teeth.
An unpleasant fringe of long green serpentine tentacles hung beneath the beak.
A greenish slime was dripping from that fearful body to the polished floor, exactly, Chan thought, as if the creature had just that instant been snatched out of the muck of some primordial jungle.
Beneath the slime, its dark scales had an odd, metallic glint.
And there was that strangling, pungent reek, which Chan slowly recognized as the odor of chlorine.
For a little time it stood almost motionless, twisting that frightful, long-beaked head, so that those three enormous red eyes, which looked in three separate directions, could survey all the circle of puny humans about it.
A queer strained hush had fallen on the Diamond Room.
For a moment there was not even a scream.
Then those nearer, choked and blinded with the breath of chlorine that had come with the creature, began to stumble uncertainly back.
The first sound was a hysterical laugh, that became a thin sobbing scream.
And then the hush became an insane stampede.
But already the thing had moved.
Three wings were abruptly extended from its armored back. Queerly, they unrolled.
They were translucently green, and delicately ribbed with darker emerald.
One on each side and the third, tail-like, behind, they raised and fell, one by one, experimentally, and then became a blur of motion.
Out of that fearful beak came an appalling bellow.
Reverberating against the lofty vault of the Diamond Room, a wild echo out of unknown jungles, it hastened the fugitive thousands.
And the creature itself, with an ungainly but amazing swiftness, ran forward on the three swaying limbs.
Its wings made a mounting thunder of sound, and the wind rushing from them was choking with chlorine.
“Back, Vanya!” gasped Chan. Chan sprang after her.
But the great wing struck his head and crushed him down.
Falling, he glimpsed the girl standing in the monster’s path.
Both her hands, he saw, were lifted to her strange white pendant.
Then the green tentacles, squirming snake-like beneath that beak, snatched her up.
The thing lifted with her above the expanding ring of panic-stricken fugitives, and flew with her swiftly down the hall.
“Get him!” It was the great voice of Hal Samdu, roaring vainly against the shrieking tumult.
“Get Chan Derron!”
Blind and coughing from the chlorine, the giant was staggering about, blinking his eyes, waving a long, bright blaster.
Jay Kalam, beside him, strangled and voiceless, was trying to call to the plain-clothes men.
“Aye, get him!” wheezed Giles Habibula from beneath a table.
“And get the mortal monster!”
“Half a million!” Caspar Hannas bellowed.
“To the man who gets Chan Derron!”
Stunned dismay and poison gas, Chan realized, had given him a few free seconds.
And, strapped to his body beneath the green cloak, he had the compact geopellor unit from his spare space suit.
The control cable ran down his sleeve, and his fingers gripped the handle.
A swift pressure on it—and he rose silently from the midst of his enemies.