The Legion of Space: The Complete Saga by Jack Williamson

Author:Jack Williamson [Williamson, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2020-06-10T21:00:00+00:00

BLIND AND coughing from the chlorine, the giant was staggering about, blinking his eyes, waving a big glittering barytron blaster. Jay Kalam, beside him, strangled and voiceless, was trying to call to the plain-clothes men.

“Aye,” wheezed Giles Habibula from beneath a table. “And get the mortal monster!”

Caspar Hannas was choking a hoarse call to his police.

“Half a million!” he bellowed. “To the man who gets Chan Derron!”

Stunned dismay and poison gas, Chan realized, had given him a bare few seconds to attempt escape. And, strapped to his body beneath the green cloak, he had the means—the compact geopeller unit from his spacesuit. The control cable ran down his sleeve, and he gripped the heavy little spindle in his hand.

A swift pressure on it—and he rose silently from the midst of his enemies. Flying high beneath the vault of the Diamond Room, he soared after the monster and the girl.

White, silent barytron bolts stabbed after him. Concrete exploded from the painted vault, rained down into the panic on the floor. He breathed the sharpness of ozone, and felt one faint shock.

But the geopeller, for all its compactness, was swift—swift enough for interplanetary flight. Chan pursued a darting zigzag. Seconds, only, had gone, when he came to the end of the long Diamond Room. But the monster, with the girl, had already vanished.

The way of their going was plain. The alien creature had scorned to use the wide doorway beneath. A ragged opening yawned in the top of the vault. Chan twisted the spindle in his hand. The geopeller flung him up through it.

And his brain, refreshed by the cool rushing wind of his flight, made a swift decision. This moment—when he was free and in the air, when the monster was creating an unwitting diversion—was obviously his chance to escape. And a faintness of dread impelled him to flight, for the girl’s accusation and the encounter with Jay Kalam had brought back all the horror of the Devil’s Rock.

But he hadn’t come here to escape. He had come to hunt the Basilisk. And the monster was the one visible clue to the identity and the methods of that amazing criminal. A little shudder tensed his straight-extended, flying body. But he knew that he must follow the monster.

The girl, he tried to tell himself, didn’t matter. The pitiless synthetic brain of Luroa, he knew, was a greater danger to him than all the legion. It would be better if the monster destroyed her. Yet, for all that, thought of Vanya Eloyan spurred him to a frantic haste.

Beyond the hole in the massive wall—which could only have been torn, he thought, by a barytron bolt or some force equally powerful, and which, therefore, meant that the monster was armed with something far more formidable than tentacles and fangs—he plunged into the corridors of the New Moon’s museum.

The monster and the girl were gone from sight. Far down one hall a little cluster of people were running frantically. Beside a glass case stood one of the attendants, with a yellow crescent on his uniform.

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