Flying high beneath the vault of the Diamond Room, he soared after the monster and the girl.
White, silent proton bolts stabbed after him.
Plaster exploded from the painted vault, raining down into the panic on the floor.
He breathed the sharpness of ozone, and felt one faint shock.
But the geopellor, for all its compactness, was swift.
Chan pursued a darting zigzag.
Seconds, only, had gone, when he came to the end of the long Diamond Room. But the monster, with the girl, had already vanished.
The trail they had left was plain.
The alien creature must have overlooked the wide doorway, for a ragged opening yawned in the top of the vault.
Chan twisted the spindle in his hand.
The geopellor flung him up through it.
And his brain, refreshed by the rushing wind of his flight, reached a swift decision.
This moment—when he was free and in the air, while the monster was creating a diversion—this was obviously his chance to escape.
And dread impelled him to flight, for the girl’s accusation and the encounter with Jay Kalam had brought back all the horror of the Devil’s Rock.
But he hadn’t come to escape.
He was hunting the Basilisk, and the monster was the one visible clue to the identity and the methods of that criminal. A shudder tensed his straight-extended flying body.
But he knew that he must follow the monster.
The girl herself, he tried to tell himself, didn’t matter.
The pitiless synthetic brain of Luroa was a greater danger to him than all the Legion.
It would be better if the monster destroyed her.
Yet, hi spite of himself, the thought of Vanya Eloyan spurred his frantic haste.
Beyond the hole in the massive wall—which could only have been torn, he thought, by some sort of explosion, and which therefore meant the monster was armed with something far more formidable than tentacles and fangs—beyond, he plunged into the corridors of the New Moon’s museum.
The monster and the girl were gone from sight.
Far down one hall a little cluster of people were running frantically.
Beside a glass case stood one of the attendants, with a yellow crescent on his uniform.
Chan dropped out of the air beside him.
“Which way?” he demanded.
The man stood wooden, glassy-eyed.
His arms made a sudden defensive gesture, against Chan—although the geopellor had been used occasionally in sport, it was still new enough so that a flying, wingless man must have seemed almost as startling as the monster.
Chan shook the attendant.
“Which way did it take her?”
“It couldn’t be!” the man sobbed.
“There isn’t such a thing!”
His eyes came into focus again, and he stared at Chan’s face as if doubting its humanity.
“A thing carrying a woman?” he whispered.
“It went on up, into the unfinished spaces.
That way!”
He pointed—and then bent suddenly, very sick.
Twisting and squeezing the spindle, Chan darted upward again.
Wind shrieked in his ears, and tore at his cloak.
He found another shattered hole in the ceiling, and plunged through into an incom-pleted part of the New Moon.
Above bare floors, naked beams and girders and cables soared upward into gulfs of darkness.
Unshaded atomic lights burned here and there, like stars in a metal universe.
They cast blue, fantastic shadows. It was thousands of feet through that network to the black curving metal of the New Moon’s hull.
Chan Derron peered, bewildered for a moment, into that blue mysterious chasm of sinister shadows and spidery metal.
His right hand dragged the blaster from beneath his cloak. Then he heard the monster.
The awesome bellow reverberated weirdly through the maze of empty steel, rolling thunderously back from the metal hull, but it gave some clue to direction.
The geopellor flung Chan upward again.
And at last, on a high platform that the builders had used, he came upon the creature and the girl.
A far blue light cast a grotesque web of black shadows across the scene.