He pulled down the lever.
The gate before him flung open, as the one behind automatically clanged shut in the face of pursuit.
A blast of air spewed him out.
The geopellor stopped his spinning flight, and brought him up to the platform where he had landed.
He found the wire marked Sector 17-B, snapped the belt of his suit to it, and squeezed the little spindle.
The geopellor flung him out along the wire.
Five hundred miles to go.
The great sign spread its web about him, silver wires shining bright against the dark of space.
Great mirrors flashed against the sun; filters glowed red and blue and green.
He glimpsed the gibbous Earth, huge and mistily brilliant, so near that he felt he could almost touch the ragged white patch that was a cyclonic storm over Europe.
Five hundred miles—but he pushed the geopellor to a reckless pace, for a warning must be flashing out, he knew, over the wires about him.
In four minutes—no more—he had released himself from the pilot wire, beside the silver ball of the control house.
His searching eyes found the Phantom Atom.
The tiny ship was safe, still hidden behind the great foil mirror.
The geopellor carried him to its valve and he flung himself inside.
The first intimation of disaster came when he saw that the prisoner he had left there, space armor welded to the housing, was gone. His heart stood still.
Was this some new trick of the Basilisk?
He opened the inner valve, and came face to face with a man waiting for him in the corridor.
A very short fat man, with protruding middle and bald spherical head and wrinkled yellow skin.
The same man—no mistaking him! —whom Jay Kalam had sent to pick his pockets in the Diamond Room.
The intruder was blinking ominously, with pale small eyes.
His fat hands held a thick cane pointing at Chan’s body—and a deadly little black orifice was visible in the ferrule that tipped it.
“Come on in, Mr. Basilisk!” he wheezed triumphantly.
“And match your mortal wits against Giles Habibula!”
13 The Hundredth Man
Hope came to the Legion with the first ultrawave message from Giles Habibula.
Uncharacteristically laconic, it ran: Aboard Derron’s ship.
Bound for mysterious object near Thuban in Draco.
For life’s sake, follow!
And the Legion followed.
Jay Kalam put the mighty Inflexible at the head of Hal Samdu’s fleet of ten geodesic cruisers.
At full power they reached northward, toward Alpha Draconis—which once had been the pole star of Earth. Toward what destination?
Every officer in the fleet was trying to answer that question.
Every electronic telescope and mass detector was driven to the utmost of its power searching for any mysterious object.
By the time they were one day out from the New Moon, part of the answer had been discovered.
Jay Kalam, tired and pale from the long strain of the chase, restlessly pacing the deep-piled rugs of his sound-proofed and ray-armored chambers in the heart of the Inflexible, paused at the signal from his communicator, and lifted the little black disk to his ear.
“We’ve found it, Commander!” came an excited voice from the bridge.
“Forty-four minutes of arc from Alpha Draconis.
It’s still invisible—albedo must be very low.
But the mass detectors indicate an object of nearly twenty million tons.
“A puzzling thing, Commander.
This object, whatever it is, must be a newcomer to the System.
We estimate the distance from the sun at a little less than ten billion miles.
Any object of that size would surely have been discovered by the Legion’s survey expedition, five years ago—if it had been there then!”
Jay Kalam put the communicator to his lips.
“Can you identify the object?”
“Not yet,” came the reply.
“Until we can pick it up on the screens, we won’t know whether it’s just a rock—or something else.”
“Keep tele-periscopes focused on the spot,” Jay Kalam ordered.
“And use every instrument to search space ahead of us, until we pick up Derron’s ship.