“I will.”
“Come, Bob,” Jay Kalam was saying.
“It’s time to go.”
He embraced his mother.
“I love you, Bob,” she was breathing.
“And I’m—oh! so afraid!”
Her slight, straight body was trembling against him.
“Be careful, son.
Don’t let the man called Merrin get away!”
“Good-by, Robert.” His father shook his hand, speaking with an unaccustomed tremor of emotion hi his voice. “Whatever happens, don’t ever forget that you are now an officer on duty with the Legion of Space.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bob Star wondered about that unspoken question he had seen hi his father’s troubled eyes, and he tried hard to answer it.
“I won’t forget!”
He went out of the Jade Room with Commander Kalam, and paused abruptly when he saw Giles Habibula, sitting half-asleep on a seat in the wide corridor outside.
“My bodyguards?” he asked quickly.
“Are they coming?”
The commander’s dark face warmed, as if to the glow of old memories.
“Giles and Hal?”
He nodded quickly.
“They’re good men—we served together, you know, long ago.
Bring them on board.”
A concealed door behind the chart room of the Invincible opened into a long chamber that Bob Star was surprised to find upon a warship of space.
Golden light from hidden sources fell upon the rich sheen of heavy rugs.
The pale ivory walls were hung with exquisite Titanian tapestries.
The massive furnishings, in silver and black, were luxuriously simple.
The long bookshelves and the optiphone, with its tall cabinets of the recorded music and drama of several planets, revealed the scholarly aesthete in the master of the room.
The Invincible was now driving outward from the sun, away from yellow-red Mars and the greenish fleck of Phobos.
Her humming geodynes—electromagnetic geodesic deflectors, in the language of the engineers—acted to deflect every atom of ship, load, and crew very slightly from the coordinates of the familiar continuum of the four dimensions, so that the vessel was driven around space-tune, rather than through it, by a direct reaction against the warp of space itself.
In that hidden room, however, even the vibrant droning of the geodynes was shut away, as if they ran in another space.
Nothing gave any faintest sense of the ship’s tremendous acceleration and velocity.
The crispness of the cooled artificial air suggested springtime in the woods of far-off Earth.
“Sit down, Bob.”
Jay Kalam nodded at a great chair, but Bob Star felt too tense and breathless to sit.
“I’m going to tell you about the prisoner we call Merrin, and the unfortunate circumstances that place this grave duty upon you.”
“This man—” Bob Star was trying to seem calm, but his dry voice trembled and sank.
“This man you call Merrin—is he—is he Stephen Oreo?”
A shadow of troubled amazement crossed the commander’s lean face.
“That is a high secret of the Legion.”
His low voice was taut and his dark eyes searching.
“A secret you had no right to know, before today.
How did you find out?”
“My mother described the prisoner, back there in the Jade Room,” Bob Star said.
“I knew Stephen Oreo, and knew there couldn’t be another like him.
But I thought—” His voice caught, and his troubled fingers came absently up to that pale, triangular scar on his forehead.
“I thought he was dead.”
“I’m glad that’s how you knew.”
The commander seemed to relax.
“Because Stephen Oreo is dead—and buried—to all except a trusted few.”
His face turned grave again.
“When did you know him?”