A dark armored shape rushed at him, beneath the surface.
The bolt from his blaster made a volcano of steam.
He drove on through it, and reached the rock, and climbed upon that with greenish slime dripping from his silver armor.
The highest peak of land now stood not five feet above the tide, which still lapped visibly upward.
Those left on the rock were fewer than a hundred now; soon there would be none at all.
He knew most of the masked, gasping, heat-parched human things clinging to the rock, but they paid him little heed.
Many were too far gone to care, but one wild creature challenged him, with a blaster, unsteadily leveled, as he tugged to open the face plate of his helmet.
“The Basilisk!” A calm restraint still ruled that rasping voice, and he recognized the Commander of the Legion.
“He’s come to mock us!” Jay Kalam cried.
“Kill him.”
That feeble cry went unheard, however, and the blaster, exhausted with firing at the winged things above, flickered harmlessly and died.
“The wrong man, Commander,” Chan whispered swiftly.
“I’m not the Basilisk—but I do have evidence that he’s hiding here among you.
Will you let me look for him?”
The chlorine-reddened eyes still seemed sane.
“If we’ve been wrong—” Jay Kalam choked and coughed and nodded weakly.
“Go ahead, Derron.
Whatever you find, we’ve little more to lose.”
“Guard the keeper.”
Chan thrust his own blaster into the Commander’s startled hands.
“I think the Basilisk is here—but I want to make a test.”
Stripping off the metal gloves of his space armor, he flung them down on the rock and gathered up a handful of small black pebbles.
He strode on to the level ledge, scarcely a foot above the water now, where Hannas and Brelekko and little Abel Davian and a few other masked, strangling men and women still knelt about their futile game, while John Comaine looked on with an expression of stolid hostility from beside his mysterious black box.
He paused a moment to peer at that box.
The remote-control device that operated the geopellor was surely something no larger.
He wished for an instant that he had kept the blaster—but still he had the test to make.
He dropped to his knees, beside gaunt Brelekko, and heaped the pebbles before him.
“I’ve come to join your game,” he said.
The yellow, bright-ringed claw of Brelekko shook the dice and rolled them.
He said nothing at all. But Caspar Hannas, smiling behind his bandages that mindless smile that was the only one upon the rock, gasped hoarsely:
“Welcome, stranger.
Though our game must soon be over—for all but one of us. That’s the real gamble, now. Because the Basilisk has promised, Commander Kalam says, that one of us is to be returned alive to the System.”
“One of you.” Chan nodded bleakly.
“But that’s no gamble, because it lacks the element of chance.
The man to be saved is the Basilisk himself.”
“Huh!”
Gaspar Hannas gulped and stared and shook his head.
“He couldn’t be here—”
“There’s evidence that he is,” Chan said.
“I suppose cowardice has helped to bring him to this least expected hiding place, here among his hopeless victims; and I imagine, too, that he is getting a sadistic satisfaction out of watching them die.”
He paused to look sharply at the broad face of Hannas, but its white idiocy still was unchanged.
“Let’s play,” he said.
“And please ask Dr. Comaine to join us.”
Hannas made a gasping grunt at John Comaine.
The big engineer nodded sullenly. Stiffly awkward, and moving with a visible reluctance, he left his instrument and came to kneel in the circle.
Chan took the dice from the talons of Brelekko, and rolled a seven.
Raking in the pebbles he had won, he brushed the fingers of Hannas and Brelekko.
He lost, and put the dice in the hand of tattered little Abel Davian—and watched that lean gray hand with narrowed eyes.
The ragged little gambler was tapping the keys of his silent calculator again, when Chan saw the angry red welts lifting on his fingers.
Chan was leaning to peer at the calculator, when muted screams, from throats burned raw with chlorine, drew his eyes upward.