“You are Giles Habibula.
I don’t think any other man could have caught me as you did.”
The yellow face beamed at her.
“Ah, so, I am Giles Habibula.
Aye, and forty years ago you would have heard my name—or a dozen of my names—in the underworlds of every planet.
For Giles Habibula, in the old days, was as great an operator—as bold and clever and successful—as you have been in yours, Luroa.”
The girl still smiled her dazzling and inscrutable smile.
“But now it seems that the two of us,” wheezed Giles Habibula, “are after another outlaw as great as we have been—greater, aye, unless we prove otherwise by catching him.”
His flat leaden eyes blinked at her.
“Shall we join forces, lass?” he asked.
“Until we have destroyed the Basilisk.”
His round yellow head jerked aft, toward Chan Der-ron in the pilot bay.
“With my own precious genius,” he said, “and with the deadly cunning and the fearful strength and the mortal beauty that Eldo Arrynu gave to you—ah, no lass, with all of them we cannot fail.”
He peered at her, anxiously.
“If you will join me, lass—man and android, against the Basilisk!”
For an instant the girl’s white loveliness had seemed frozen, so that the wonder of her smile seemed a hollow, painted thing.
But then her face abruptly softened.
She slipped the blaster into a holster that her furs concealed, and held out a strong slender hand to Giles Habibula.
“I’m with you, Giles,” she said, “until the Basilisk is dead.”
And the old Legionnaire wondered at a difference in her voice.
Somehow it seemed naive, bewildered, troubled—somehow like a child’s.
“Come, Giles,” she said, and beckoned toward the cabin where she had hidden.
“There’s something I must tell you.”
15 The Dreadful Rock
The rock, black and naked, broke a lonely sea.
The sea had a muddy, green-black color, cut with long strips of floating yellow-red weed.
Its surface had an oily, glistening smoothness.
The sky above it was a smoky, greenish blue.
And the luminary that rose very slowly in it, baking the rock under merciless rays, seemed larger than the sun.
It presented an enormous crimson disk, pocked with spots of darkness.
The infra-red predominated in its radiation, so that its dull light brought a sweltering heat.
Upon the summit of the rock, an uneven granite bench not fifty yards in length, were crowded one hundred men and women.
Their bodies were slowly cooking under the unendurable rays of that slowly rising sun.
They were parched with thirst, for the ocean about them was an undrinkable brine.
And they all were coughing, strangling, weeping, gasping with respiratory distress, for the green in the air was free chlorine.
They were the hundred the Basilisk had taken.
The last arrival, Jay Kalam, remembered hearing a sudden, queerly penetrating purr, as he stood in his chamber aboard the Inflexible. A resistless force dragged him into a frightful chasm of airless cold.
But even before the breath could go out of him, light came back—the dull sinister radiation of this dying star.
The feral purr receded, and he found himself sprawling on this barren rock.
Chlorine burned his lungs.
A savage gravitation dragged at his body. Heat struck him with a driving, blistering force. And he was sick with an utter hopelessness of despair.
“Commander Kalam!” choked a voice.
“You?”
It was Lars Eccard, the abducted chairman of the Green Hall Council, red-eyed and gasping, who aided him to his feet.
He peered with smarting eyes about the bare summit of the rock, and saw many that he knew—even bent as they were with continual coughing and masked inadequately against the toxic gas with scraps of dampened rags tied over their nostrils.
He saw Bob Star and a few other Legionnaires who had been taken, standing guard with their blasters on the highest points of the rock.
And beyond them, wheeling and soaring and diving in the poison yellow-green haze that hung upon the poison sea, he glimpsed a dozen living originals of the monstrous robot that had appeared in the Diamond Room of the New Moon.
“They have attacked many times, Commander,” rasped Lars Eccard, beside him.
“Thus far we have always beaten them off, but all the weapons are nearly dead.”
“I have my own blaster.”