She reached to catch his hand and squeeze it sympathetically, and then stooped quickly again over the queerly toy-like device on the little table, which was a lever to thrust whole planets into annihilation.
When he saw the look on her face—the calm authority that was almost divine and the willing acceptance of ultimate death as its price—his own restless impatience began to seem petty childishness.
She finished some final adjustment, and straightened to face John Star.
“It’s ready,” she said.
“Then use it.”
She picked up the tiny device, and carried it to the vast west windows.
Following, Bob Star was shaken with a puzzled dread.
He wet his lips, and whispered hoarsely:
“Can you use it safely, here inside the building?
And find the comet, without a telescope?”
“I can.”
She glanced back gravely.
“It’s mental force, that moves the lever.
There’s no danger to anything except the object at which it is directed.
And a telescope would be only hi the way, because light’s too slow to show the target where it is.
What I’ve called the fulcrum, remember, is something outside space and tune.”
She had turned to lift the small device, her slender hands white with her tension but yet oddly steady.
She seemed to be sighting through the peepholes hi the two tiny metal disks—though the comet, now by day, was invisible to Bob Star’s eyes.
Her finger was moving to touch the key when John Star sprang to catch her arm.
“Wait!” he gasped.
Beyond them, Bob Star saw a pale blur of blue flame hi the sky.
He heard the whisper and the rushing and the thunderous roar of rockets.
The air was alive with quivering sound, and he glimpsed a mountain of white metal, flashing above the window.
Then the red floor trembled, and the rockets were suddenly still.
“It’s the Invincible!”
In that abrupt silence, John Star’s taut voice seemed oddly small and far away.
“Commander Kalam must have followed me—I can’t quite imagine why!”
He turned slowly from the window, to Aladoree.
“I think you should wait, until we know.”
Bob Star had run to join them at the window.
A thousand feet below and a mile away, he saw the enormous ship—far too large for the stage on the tower, it had come down in the forest.
The trees beyond it were uprooted and blazing from the rocket blast.
Even from this height, it looked literally invincible, and the shining might of it gave him a momentary sense of pride in the Legion and mankind.
It was the most magnificent machine that men had ever made.
The geodyne drive put the stars within its reach.
New, refractory alloys made its bright hull invulnerable.
Its great weapon, the atomic vortex gun, could desolate planets.
A rocket plane lifted from the hull, as he watched, and climbed swiftly toward the stage above the tower.
His mother’s eyes followed it, bright with hope.
“That must be Jay,” she whispered.
“We must wait.”
She lowered the device she had been aiming toward the comet, and Bob Star turned from the mighty miracle of the Invincible to peer at it once more.
“It’s so small!” he protested breathlessly.
“Made of such common things!
It looks so insignificant—beside the Invincible.
As if it couldn’t really destroy—anything!”
“This is only the lever.”
She lifted it on her small palm, almost casually.
She must have seen the awed wonder in his eyes, for she added quietly: “I carry it taken apart and the parts disguised, as another measure of security.
Yet, even if the assembled instrument fell into hostile hands, there would be no danger.