“But I’m not keeping any secret now,” he protested restlessly.
“None except the fact that my mother is to give me AKKA when her doctors say it’s no longer safe with her—a day that I hope won’t come for another twenty years and more.
Must I stay a prisoner all the4ime I wait?”
“Perhaps the orders seem a trifle strict.” The old man’s bald head bobbed sympathetically. “But why fume about it?
If we’re confined to Phobos, it’s still a precious scrap of paradise.
We’ve all the comforts of the greatest palace in the System.
To say nothing of the privilege of a noble cellar filled with famous vintages.
Tell me, what’s so mortal bad about it?”
“Nothing, really.”
Bob Star’s ringers lifted nervously to touch a scar on his forehead, a pale triangular ridge that didn’t tan.
“I know it’s a tremendous honor to be chosen keeper of AKKA, even though I didn’t want it.
But I couldn’t sleep last night, and I suppose I got to brooding.”
“Your head?”
Giles Habibula had seen his ringers on the scar.
“Is that the trouble, lad?
Is that old concussion causing pain again?”
He dropped his hand self-consciously, his face drawn stern against the old man’s sympathy.
That throbbing pain had not come back— but only because it had never really ceased.
The nature and the consequences of that old injury were secrets of his own, however, guarded as stubbornly as he meant to guard the weapon called AKKA.
His lips tightened silently.
“If it’s just a mood, I know the cure for that!”
Giles Habibula beamed at him hopefully.
“A platter of ham and steak and eggs, with hot brown bread, and a pot of coffee to wash them down.
And then perhaps an apple pie.
You got up too mortal early, dragging a poor old soldier out of his bed without a blessed bite to eat.
Let’s go back to breakfast!”
“Later, Giles.”
Bob Star spoke absently, peered at the dark sky again.
“But first I want to look for something.”
“Whatever it is, we’ll never find it on an empty belly.”
The old man was peering with a sudden dismay at the grim lines of strain, which made that searching face seem for a moment prematurely old.
“But what’s the matter, lad?
You’re too young to look so grave.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Bob Star kept looking at the sky.
“I don’t quite know why.
But my windows were open, and while I was lying there I happened to see something among the stars.”
“Yes, lad?”
The wheezy voice of Giles Habibula seemed curiously apprehensive.
“And what was that?”
“Just a little greenish fleck,” Bob Star said slowly.
“In Virgo, near Vindemiatrix.
I don’t quite know why, but it got on my nerves.
It went out of sight, when Mars began to rise.
I don’t know what it was, but I’m going to have a look at it, with the telescope yonder.”
He started on toward the shining dome of the small observatory he had set up at the end of the garden—so that he could rove the stars with its electronic screens and his own restless mind, in spite of his imprisonment.
“Wait, lad!”
The fat man’s voice was sharper.
“You wouldn’t drag a poor old soldier of the Legion out of his blessed sleep in the middle of the night, just to look at a star?”
“But it isn’t any ordinary star.”
He swung back to Giles Habibula, with a frown of disturbed perplexity.