“I know you have the right to veto the first order.
And I know what a terrible responsibility you carry.
I think I understand your feelings.
But this danger’s too great and near to be denied.
For all we know, one of the invisible Cometeers may be with us now, in this very room!”
He glanced quickly about that jade-and-silver chamber.
Agony whitened his lean face, and tears shone in his eyes.
Impulsively, he swept Aladoree into his arms.
Bob Star stepped quickly back, astonished; he had almost forgotten that his father was a human being, as well as a soldier.
“Won’t you do it, darling?” he was pleading. “For your sake—and for mine!”
Gravely, Aladoree pushed his arms away.
“What was the secret,” she asked, “that the Cometeers got?”
John Star turned to look at his son.
His lips drew tight.
He nodded slowly, as if in reluctant admission of Bob’s right to be here.
“They learned,” he said, “that the man known as Merrin is still alive.”
Bob Star watched the new dismay that swept the color from his mother’s face.
He saw the slight, shocked movement of her head.
Her voice, when at last she spoke, seemed oddly quiet.
“It makes all the difference, if they know about—about Merrin.
It leaves us no choice.”
She nodded unwillingly.
“If they’ve found out —that, then they must be destroyed.”
3 The Fulcrum and the Force
Bob Star stood watching his mother, frowning with a puzzled anxiety.
With the stern regret with which she had made that terrible decision still lingering on her face, she had turned quickly away from him and his father.
She was bent now over a small table of polished Venusian scarletwood, busy with a few little objects she had gathered from about her person: her watch, a pen and a mechanical pencil, a metal ornament from her dress, an iron key.
“Must I go?” he whispered.
She looked up at him, with a grave little smile.
“You may stay,” she said.
“Since one day you are to become the keeper of the peace.
Though there’s very little to see.”
She glanced at the harmless-seeming objects on the little table.
“You could watch a thousand times without learning the secret,” she added, “because the control of AKKA is more than half mental.”
She was busy again.
With a deft skill that seemed to show long practice, she unscrewed the barrel from the pen and removed two tiny perforated disks from the back of the watch.
Upon the mechanical pencil, whose working parts provided a fine adjustment, she began assembling a tiny, odd-looking contrivance.
The platinum chain of the ornament seemed to form an electrical connection, and the clip from the pen would function as a key.
Bob Star peered at it, and whispered unbelievingly.
“Is that little gadget—all there is?”
“It’s all there is to see.”
Her fine eyes came back to him for an instant, frowning with the gravity of her task.
“This little device is merely the lever,” she said.
“The force that moves it is mental.
The fulcrum on which it works—” Her pale lips drew stern.
“The fulcrum is the secret.”
Bob Star shook his head, staring at that tiny instrument.
“You mean that you destroyed the Moon, when those other invaders from the Runaway Star had made their fortress there—with only that for a weapon?”
“With the same sort of lever.”
She glanced at John Star, and he gave her an awed little smile, as if they both were living again through that dreadful instant.