And look through the report, while we’re waiting.”
He broke the seal on the big green envelope.
“Eh!”
His jaw fell slack.
“This is no report.”
“But it is, Jay!
It hasn’t been out of my sight.”
Out upon the desk the Commander poured a score of neatly tied packets of little yellow slips.
“These are I O U’s!” he gasped. “Payable to the New Moon Syndicate.
They must have come from the vaults of Caspar Hannas!
And here—here—”
His trembling fingers had found a familiar sheet of stiff crimson parchment.
It bore the serpentine monogram.
Upon it, hi that precise familiar script, was written:
My dear Commander: Admiral-General Samdu’s brilliant summary has given you a sufficient idea of the genuinely brilliant work of his investi-gators, and I believe that circumstances will very shortly prove the document to be no longer of value to you.
The Basilisk
“Derron!”
Waving the blaster, Hal Samdu was peering wildly about the great armored room.
“We can’t escape bun—not even here!
If Giles doesn’t get him—”
Jay Kalam was still staring at the red sheet, with dull lifeless eyes, when:
Krrr!
Krrr!
Krrr! shrilled the tiny, piercing emergency call from his communicator.
With stiff fingers he groped again for the little black disk, set the dial, and held it to his ear.
Hal Samdu, watching, saw his face grow taut and white.
The instrument at last dropped out of his fingers, and he swayed over the desk, holding himself up with trembling arms. “It wasn’t the reply,” Hal Samdu was rasping hoarsely. “There hasn’t been time!
What has happened, Jay?”
The lustreless, glazing eyes of Jay Kalam stared at him.
“The worst, Hal,” he whispered.
“That was a frightened bodyguard calling from Phobos—the call crossed ours.
The Basilisk has struck again.
This time he has taken them all.
John Star.
And Bob’s wife and her child.
And—” He made a little shrug of hopeless defeat.
“And—the keeper of the peace!”
12 The Plundered Vault
That mighty, feral purr receded.
The icy cold was gone.
Chan Derron could breathe again.
Swaying unsteadily, still on his feet, he tried to see where he was, but a smothering darkness wrapped him.
His heart was hammering.
His breath was a rapid gasping.
Cold goose pimples still roughened his body.
He had been snatched from before the menacing weapon of Vanya Eloyan, he knew, by that uncanny agency of the Basilisk—and his very vanishing, the girl would take for absolute proof that he was himself the criminal!
But now—where was he?
In some confined black space.
His feet scraped on a metal floor, and the swift ring of the sound told him that walls were near.
He stumbled forward, and his hands came upon a barrier of cold metal.