Recreation in our clubs and theatres!
Knowledge in our museums and observatories.
Thrills, and beauty— everywhere!
Fortune, if you’re lucky, in our gaming salons!
Even oblivion if you desire it, at our Clinic of Euthanasia!
“But all the same,” Jay Kalam whispered to the sign, “I think I’ll still take the quiet peace of John Star’s home on Phobos—”
The Commander stiffened, behind his desk.
For the great sign, where a green flaming hand had begun to write some new invitation, suddenly flickered.
It went out.
For an instant it was dark.
Then red, ragged, monstrous letters spelled, startlingly his own name!
“KALAM!”
Darkness again.
Then the fiery scarlet symbols:
“G-39!”
An explosion of red-and-white pyrotechnics wiped that out.
One blue spark grew into an immense blue star.
The star framed the Moon Girl again.
She laughed, and a white arm beckoned.
But Jay Kalam was no longer watching the sign.
For G-39 was his call in the secret emergency intelligence code to be used only in cases of grave necessity.
A little chill of cold forewarning shook his hand, as he touched the communicator dial.
“All right, Lundo,” he told the orderly.
“Get me Caspar Hannas on the visiwave!”
Builder and master of this gaudiest and most glittering of all resorts, Caspar Hannas was a man who had come up out of a dubious obscurity.
The rumors of his past—that he had been a space-pirate, drug runner, android-agent, crooked gambler, gang-boss, and racketeer-in-general—were many and somewhat contradictory.
The first New Moon had been the battered hulk of an obsolescent space liner, towed into an orbit about the Earth twenty years ago.
The charter somehow issued to the New Moon Syndicate hi the interplanetary confusion following the First Interstellar War had given that gambling ship the status of a semi-independent planet, which made it a convenient refuge from the more stringent laws of Earth and the rest of the System.
Caspar Hannas, the head of the syndicate, had defied outraged reformers—and prospered exceedingly.
The wondrous artificial satellite, first opened to the public a dec-ade ago, had replaced a whole fleet of luxury liners that once had circled just outside the laws of Earth.
The financial rating of the syndicate was still somewhat uncertain—Hannas had been called, among many other things, a conscienceless commercial octopus; but the new resort was obviously a profitable business enterprise, efficiently administered by Hannas and his special police.
His enemies—and there was no lack of them—liked to call the man a spider.
True enough, his sign in the sky was like a gaudy web.
True, millions swarmed to it, to leave their wealth—or even, if they accepted the dead-black chip that the croupiers would give any player for the asking, their lives.
The man himself must now have been somewhat beyond sixty.
But as he sat, gigantic and impassive, at the odd round desk in his office, watching the flowing tape that recorded the winnings hi all the halls, sipping the dark Martian beer that never intoxicated him, no onlooker could have guessed his age within a score of years—or guessed anything at all that moved behind his face.
For the face of Caspar Hannas, men said, had changed with his fortunes.
His old face, they said, had reflected his real nature too well.
It had showed the scars of too many battles.
And it was printed, they whispered, on too many notices of reward.
The face of Caspar Hannas, now, like the flesh of his great idle hands, was very white—but whiter still, if one looked closely at its vast smooth expanse, were the tiny scars the surgeons had left.
It was oddly blank.
The only expression that ever moved it was a slow and meaningless smile—a smile that made its white smoothness like the face of a monstrously overgrown idiot child’s.
The eyes of the man, set far apart and deep in that white bald head, were sharp and midnight black.
Beyond that idiotic smile, they had a contradictory keenness.
But their dark piercing fixity never revealed what was passing in the mind of Caspar Hannas.
Such a face, men agreed, was singularly useful to a man hi his trade.
It was what Jay Kalam waited to see upon the shining oval plate of the visiwave cabinet. (One of the System’s first useful developments from the conquered science of the comet, this instrument utilized the instantaneous achronic force-fields that the lovely fugitive, Kay Nymidee, had used to escape from the comet.)
The plate flickered, and Jay Kalam saw the vast smooth features of the New Moon’s master.
And now not even that senseless smile could hide the apprehension devouring the vitals of Caspar Hannas.