“Good,” Chan said.
“I think I know where to look.
Try the vicinity of the red star Ulnar XIV, about eighty light-years north.
Here are the heliocentric co-ordinates of the position.”
He gave her the scrap of paper he had found hi Hannas’ vault.
She turned to the long maze of untended controls.
She held hurried little conferences with Giles Habibula, as the old man went to work beside her, his fat hands as familiarly skillful, Chan thought, as if they had built everything they touched.
Gripping his blaster, peering this way and that, Chan kept an anxious watch.
It began to seem to him that the humming emptiness of this space was more terrible than a horde of the Basilisk’s robots would have been—until he heard a familiar feral purr, and saw green-winged horror flapping at the farther end of the long room.
This time he knew that the central crimson eye was a vulnerable point.
His white ray flashed.
The monster fell, sprawling weirdly over a bank of dials, before it could lift the Legion-type blaster hi its own green tentacles.
“Don’t worry,” Chan called to Giles and the girl. “I got it!”
But the violet eyes of Stella Eleroid were startled and grave.
“We had the remote control disconnected half an hour ago,” she told him.
“The arrival of that monster means that the Basilisk has another geofractor hi operation—somewhere!”
She paused to shudder.
“He may send us something else!”
Chan Derron resumed his apprehensive watch.
“We’ve found it, Chan!” came the girl’s eager voice an hour later.
Her eyes were fixed upon a tiny, shielded screen, in a little oblong control-box.
“The place where the geofractors must have been built.
It’s on a great planet that circles the red star.
In the middle of a high plateau, there’s a clearing in the jungle. Mines. Furnace stacks. Metal roofs of factories. The foundation, miles long, where the geofractors must have been built.
A sort of robot-city—I see thousands of the winged robots, wheeling about. Some of them fighting, I think, with their real-life originals at the edge of the jungle.
The Basilisk must have begun by building robots, and setting them to build others—”
“But the Basilisk, himself?” broke in the anxious nasal wheeze of Giles Habibula.
“Where’s the mortal Basilisk?”
Stella Eleroid shook her platinum head—and Chan wondered briefly which was real: the blond curls and violet eyes of Vanya Eloyan, or the red-mahogany hair and grey-green eyes he had learned to know from the posters of the android Luroa?
“There are no human beings in sight,” she said.
“Only those robots.”
“Keep searching, lass!” gasped Giles Habibula.
“The criminal must be somewhere.
And all those people he took away.”
Chan Derron stood his endless watch.
The girl moved delicate controls and watched a screen inside that hooded box.
“Here!” she whispered at last.
“A spot that must be ten thousand miles from that city of robots, in the middle of a reddish ocean.
There was a shadow that the search field could hardly pierce—a barrier field, I suppose, set up by some device like my own.”
She touched the white jewel.
“But I’ve broken through it—the device is not quite so perfect as my father would have made it.
I can see a tiny rock, crowded with people fighting—” Her voice died away.
She bent closer, shaking her head as if with pity.
“People?” Chan whispered sharply.
“Who?”
“I can’t see,” she whispered.
“All their faces are masked—maybe against some gas, because they’re all coughing. A ragged, pitiful lot.
The water seems to be rising, and they are most of them fighting for higher places on the rock.
Creatures like that robot are flying over them, and great black armored monsters are leaping out of the rising sea.”
Giles Habibula was blinking intently over her shoulder.