Chan Derron’s face set grimly.
“I’ll not surrender,” he said.
“I know the fleet is close behind.
And we haven’t cathode plates to keep up full speed—they may soon be in range, with the vortex gun.
But I’m going on to the geofractor.
If you won’t help—” His weapon gestured ominously.
A dull green gleam flashed from a finger of the hand that held it, and Giles Habibula blinked.
“Eh, lad!” he gasped.
“Your ring—where’d you get that ring?”
“It was my mother’s,” Chan Derron said.
“She had the stone reset for me.”
“Let me see it.”
The old man held out a trembling hand.
“It’s Venusian malichite? Carved into a die?
The spots all threes and fours?”
He scanned Chan’s big body with an odd intentness.
“Tell me, lad—who was your mother?
Where did you get this stone?”
“The jewel belonged to my grandmother.” Chan stared at him blankly.
“She was a Venusian singer.
Her name was Ethyra Coran!”
“Ethyra Coran!”
The eyes of Giles Habibula were suddenly brimming with tears.
His big body heaved out of the chair. He pushed Chan’s blaster unceremoniously aside, and flung his arms about him.
“What’s this?”
“Don’t you see?” wheezed Giles Habibula.
“Your mother was my own precious daughter. You’re my own blood, Chan Derron.
The grandson of Giles Habibula!”
“Then—” Chan freed himself, stared into the beaming yellow face.
“Then—will you help me?”
“Ah, so!” the old man cried.
“And gladly!
For no grandson of Giles Habibula could be the Basilisk.”
With a grave and silent question in them, the eyes of Chan Derron looked at the girl.
For a long moment, her level violet eyes met his, dark with another question.
At last she nodded slowly.
“We’ll give you a chance, Chan Derron,” she said.
“If you can find the Basilisk.”
17 The Final Gamble
The pursuing fleet crept up behind, in spite of Giles Habibula’s frantic appeals to the Commander.
The first shot from the vortex gun came after the Phantom Atom: a vast expanding field of atomic instability that burned strange with deadly radiations and sucked at the fugitive ship with a ruthless attraction.
“Let me tune your geodynes!” gasped Giles Habibula, as the tiny vessel fought that consuming maelstrom.
“I’ve been an engine man for fifty precious years, and I can coax the generators to more than they can do.”
And, indeed, when his deft hands had retuned her geodynes, the tiny vessel began to draw ahead again.
The second whirling field of atomic disruption groped after them with weaker fingers; the third flamed and died far behind.
And the Phantom Atom was many hours ahead of the fleet, when they came to the geofractor.
Chan Derron’s brain was staggered by that machine’s immensity, and baffled by its strangeness.
Against the star-shot dark of space hung two great spheres of blacker blackness.
Three colossal rings, set all at right angles, bound each of them; and between them, connecting them, was a smaller cylinder of the same dully gleaming metal.
“It looks a little bit like a twenty-million ton peanut,” he muttered.