Jay Kalam touched his weapon, but the lean old statesman shook his head.
“It will help, Commander.”
He paused to cough and sob for breath.
“But not for long.
For the tide is rising.
Already, since dawn, it has come up a hundred feet.
Another hundred will cover the rock.
And there are things in the water more deadly than those in the sky.”
Jay Kalam climbed a little higher on the rock, with Lars Eccard stumbling behind him.
All the haggard, white-masked faces he saw were familiar to him, for these were the hundred foremost citizens of the System.
A woman lay on a little shelf of stone.
Improvised bandages covered her arms and shoulders.
A small golden-haired girl knelt beside her, sobbing.
Her bandaged hand patted the child’s head.
“That is Robert Star’s wife,” said Lars Eccard.
“One of the winged monsters snatched her up.
She was almost beyond the cliffs, before Bob killed it.
It dropped her, and fell into the sea.
The things that dragged it under the water were terrible indeed.”
A fit of coughing seized Jay Kalam. It left him breathless, trembling, blinded.
His lungs were on fire.
Lars Eccard tore a scrap off his tunic, and gave it to him.
“Wet this, Commander,” he said.
“Tie it around your face.
Water absorbs chlorine.”
On a higher ledge, they came upon a dozen men and women kneeling in a circle.
All wore the rude masks, and one or another of them was always coughing.
But they seemed to ignore the flesh-corroding death they breathed, and the black-winged death that wheeled and screamed above them, the crimson death of heat that beat down from the immense and lazy sun, and the manifold and hidden death beneath the acid, monster-infested sea that rose inexorably about the rock.
Each had before him a little heap of pebbles, and their red half-blinded eyes were upon a pair of dancing dice.
Lars Eccard looked down at them and shrugged.
“If it helps them to forget—”
Caspar Hannas was the banker at that game.
His broad face, beneath its yellow-stained mask, showed a slow and senseless smile.
And the same eagerness moved his great white hands to draw in the pebbles he won, as if they had been diamond chips on the tables of his own New Moon.
John Comaine, the big blond engineer, did not play.
He squatted across from Hannas.
His long square face had a wooden impassive look, and his glassy protruding eyes were fixed upon his old employer with what seemed a well-suppressed hostility.
Beside him was the queer, box-like instrument he had set up on the New Moon to detect the mysterious agency of the Basilisk.
Amo Brelekko was rolling the dice.
A white handkerchief covered half his face, but otherwise he seemed unchanged since the Diamond Room.
His gaudy garments looked immaculate.
The rays of the low red sun splintered from his jewels.
His thin yellow hands manipulated the cubes with a deft and incredible skill. For all that old skill, however, he rolled and lost.
The winner, whose thin nervous hands snatched eagerly for the pebbles, was a little gray wisp of a man whose stooped and tattered figure seemed vaguely familiar.
He set the play down in a little black book, and then tapped swiftly at the keys of a compact, silent little calculating machine.
And suddenly Jay Kalam knew him.
He was Abel Davian, the little gambler the Basilisk had taken from the New Moon’s Diamond Room.
The yellow-stamped money bag, that must still hold the twenty million dollars of his fatal winnings, lay disregarded on the rock be-side him.
But he pushed out a handful of black pebbles, and took the dice from Brelekko.
Perspiration rolled from his shrunken skin, as he shook the cubes, and threw.