“Because I know it wasn’t there a few nights ago—I happened to be searching that same sector of the sky for an asteroid that seems to have strayed off the charts.
It couldn’t be a nova—not with that strange, pale green color!”
“Forget it, lad,” the old Legionnaire whined persuasively.
“Any star can have a wicked look, to a man without his breakfast.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
He shook his head uneasily.
“The object got to haunting me, while I lay there watching it.
It got to seeming like an eye, staring back.
It made me—afraid.”
He shivered, in the thin wind across the roof.
“I don’t know why, but I am really afraid.”
“Afraid?”
Giles Habibula gave the brightening sky a hurried, fishy glance.
“I don’t see anything to fear.
And we’re no cowards, lad.
Neither you nor I.
Not with the proper victuals in us—”
“Perhaps it’s a comet.”
Still frowning, Bob Star swung back toward the observatory.
“It looked like one—it was a short streak of that queer, misty green, instead of the point a star would show.”
He shrugged uncomfortably.
“But then any comet should have been detected and reported long ago, by the big observatories.
It hasn’t been—I’ve been reading all the astrophysical reports, with nothing else to do!
I can’t imagine what it is, but I’m going to have a look.”
“Don’t, lad!”
The wheezy voice sharpened, with a puzzling urgency.
“Let’s not meddle with fate.”
“How’s that?”
He peered sharply at the old man’s seamed bland face.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I’ve seen trouble—and I don’t like it.” Giles Habibula nodded unhappily.
“I know we’ve had a peaceful time this last year, since Hal and I came back with you from Earth.
Ah, a happy time, with little to do but fill our guts and sleep.
But I’ve lived through things to chill your blood.”
Bob Star backed away, watching him anxiously.
“I’ve known the mortal times some men call adventure,” he went on dolefully.
“I was with your father, along with Commander Kalam and Hal Samdu, twenty years and more ago, when we went out to the Runaway Star, to fight the wicked Medusae for your dear mother’s life and her precious secret.”
“I know,” Bob Star nodded.
“The four of you were the heroes who rescued my mother’s weapon and saved the human planets.
But what has that to do with this fleck of green mist in the sky?”
“Only that I’ve had enough,” the old man said.
“Listen, lad, to a word of kind advice.
Heroism is damned uncomfortable.
Let’s forget this monstrous comet.
It might have waited until my poor old bones were laid to rest—instead of coming to upset my last days with such frightful talk.”
He shook his head forebodingly.
“Poor old Giles!
He had only sat down, with a bottle of wine in his trembling fingers, ready to stretch his legs before the fire and doze away into the last blessed sleep, when this fearful comet came, to start him awake with the threat of another stellar war.
Ah, in dear life’s name—”
“Stellar war!”