The sullen sun stood now at the zenith, and against its dull-red face he saw the black shape of the geofractor—or the stand-by machine, this must be; the one that had been used to send that attacking robot into the other.
The black shadow of it was spreading swiftly across that sinister disk.
It was falling!
Cold with fear, he understood this desperate last gambit of the Basilisk.
The criminal had shielded this rock against the refractor fields.
The barrier must be maintained—against Stella Eleroid, at the controls of the other geofractor. But, even if the stand-by machine couldn’t reach through the barrier, it would still fall through.
Swiftly, it grew in the sky.
Watching it, listening to the gasps and sobs of all those who waited hopelessly for its millions of tons of metal to crush them into that acid sea, Chan failed for a moment to hear the deep sudden purring in the air around Him.
When he did hear it, and knew that the barrier had been lifted, he moved very quickly.
His great hand snatched the little calculating machine out of Abel Davian’s swelling fingers. He smashed it against the ledge, seized a rock, and crushed the fragments to scrap and dust.
“Why, sir?”
The little gambler blinked bewilderedly at him through thick lenses.
“What are you doing?”
“Conducting an allergy test,” Chan rapped at him.
“I don’t understand you, sir!”
Chan glanced up at the stupendous shape of the falling geofractor and around him at the silent exiles crouching on the rock.
They awaited its impact, he thought, almost with gratitude.
“We’ve probably three minutes.”
He grinned bleakly at Abel Davian.
“And you ought to be interested in this test—since you are the one who showed a positive reaction.”
“I—what do you mean sir?”
“Four years ago,” Chan Derron told him, “when I helped Dr. Eleroid’s pseudo-assistant carry his working model of the geofractor down into that armored room where he was killed, the man contrived to keep me from seeing his face—he muffled himself against the cold, and made me walk in front, and kept leaning over the box.
However, it happened that my hand touched his.
I saw rapid red swellings rising upon his fingers, and I noticed that he sneezed.”
Chan’s darkened eyes stabbed at the cringing gray man.
“When I learned a little while ago how the crime was carried out, I happened to remember that you began to sneeze as you came toward me in the Diamond Room on the New Moon, just before you vanished—and I had wondered already how it came that you had the audacity to win on that particular night.
All that was enough to suggest the possible utility of your portable calculator.”
Rigid, pale, Abel Davian stood feebly shaking his head.
“I contrived to touch your hands, just now,” Chan’s harsh voice raced on. “And I observe again the symptoms of an extreme allergy sensitive to my body.
That is a rare but proven phenomenon—the proteids of one human body acting as allergens to another.
Its very rarity made the identification quite positive—even before I had confirmed it by proving that your calculating machine was the portable remote-control box through which you operated the geofractors, Mr. Basilisk.”
Ashen, palsied, the little man was cowering back from him.
His hunted eyes flashed up at the enormous bulk of the falling geofractor, swelling ever more swiftly in the greenish sky.
They came back to Chan, magnified by the thick lenses, lurid with a triumphant hatred.
“What if I am the Basilisk?” his shrill voice whined defiantly.
“I’m still the winner—because I’ve had my revenge, and none of you can escape.
If we had three minutes—now I think we’ve less than two.”
“Perhaps it doesn’t matter.”
Nodding almost abstractedly, Chan turned from that colossal falling mechanism and the silent people waiting for it.
“But still there’s something I’d like to know.” He scowled at the trembling gambler.
“Why should you want revenge— upon so many of us?”
“Because my people were Purples.”
Savagery twisted Davian’s thin gray face.
“My mother’s family had once been favorites of the emperors. I believe my real father was Eric the Pretender.
It was the Green Hall that crushed the empire, and drove us into exile.”
His narrow shoulders stiffened with a supercilious pride.
“But for all of you—the Legion and the Council and the keeper of the peace, I should have been a prince of the Purple Hall.”
“I see.”
Chan Derron glanced sadly at the limp, unconscious form of the keeper of the peace and John Star standing guard beside her— and his breath caught.
“But that isn’t all you’ve done,” Davian’s bitter voice ran on.