Was this the Euthanasia Clinic—and the thought drove a cold blade of panic into him—where another victim of the Basilisk had been found murdered?
Was death waiting for him, in this thick darkness, now?
What was that?
He crouched and spun.
Intently he listened, but there was no sound beyond the prompt echo.
His eyes strained vainly into the blackness.
His hand swept instinctively toward the holster under his cloak.
And then he remembered, with a sinking sickness in his heart, that the girl had disarmed him.
Something brushed his shoulder.
He put up a defensive arm, and something tapped it again.
He tried to quiet a pounding heart, and groped before him. His cold fingers caught a swinging pendant. He pulled at it, and a blue-white glare of atomic light blinded him.
For a moment he had to cover his eyes.
And then, staring about, he blinked again in wonder.
This was indeed a vault—just before him was the ponderous lock-mechanism of an armored door that must have weighed two hundred tons—but in no crematorium.
For the long shelves that lined the branching narrow corridors were stacked with the heavy bags and rolls and packets that held the symbols of wealth, all neatly sorted into chips and scrip and coin and currency.
And every bag and roll and packet bore the yellow crescent that was the New Moon’s emblem.
This, the dazed realization broke upon Chan, was the New Moon’s treasure vault!
Then he noticed a curious thing. The scrip of the New Moon Syndicate, the chips used at play, and the bags of coin were all apparently intact—but upon the shelves labeled to contain Green Hall certificates, there were only stacks of rough clay bricks.
The vault had been looted!
What remained was almost worthless—all the real money was gone, with only mocking clay left in its place!
And his tall body went suddenly rigid and cold.
For the vault would presently be opened—probably it had been locked, for safety, because of the Basilisk’s promised raid.
When it was opened, the Le-gion of Space and the New Moon police would find the man they thought they wanted—cornered.
In the silence of the vault, Chan began to wonder if the man who had put him there still watched him.
His strained nerves could feel alert and hostile eyes upon him.
Imagination pictured the Basilisk laughing at him—a low thick chuckle, he thought of it, cold, diabolical, inhumanly gloating.
“Well, Mr. Basilisk?”
He couldn’t stop his own wild, ragged voice from talking into the mocking silence.
“What am I to do now?
Sit down and cry?
Tear my nails out scratching at the wall?
Hang myself from the shelves?
Or just let them find me?”
It was hard to keep from screaming.
He paced up and down the metal floor, driven with a savage, futile energy. Apprehension painted a vague sinister presence, leering from beyond the shelves.
“Well, can you hear me?” he choked.
“How does it feel to be a god, Basilisk?
To watch every man in the System?
To follow all who try to escape your power, wherever they go? To take what you want?
And slay whom you will?”
He shook his fist, against the bare metal wall.
“It may feel pretty great—to your twisted brain—whoever you are.
But you won’t last forever!
For some poor devil will get you— somebody that you’ve mocked and tortured and battered until all that keeps him alive is a little voice that says kill him, kill him, kill him!
“Somebody, Basilisk, like me.”
Then it happened that his aimless pacing brought him to the scrap of paper on the floor and it happened that his wildly staring eyes glimpsed the scrawled symbols on it.
With a wondering exclamation, he snatched it up, smoothed it with his fingers, studied it anxiously.
A small oblong sheet, torn across one end.
Scratched upon it, in hasty pencil marks, were three heliocentric space-time positions, followed by a series of numbers in which Chan could see neither relation nor meaning.
The first position designated was that of the New Moon, he recognized—the position it had occupied at the moment of that midnight on which the Basilisk had taken the little gambler, Davian.