“Ah, lad!”
The fat man came waddling toward him, flinching visibly from the nearness of that dreadful precipice, yet beaming with a surprised relief.
“We thought you’d never wake, before you died of cold.”
The gigantic strength of Hal Samdu swept him to his feet.
Clinging weakly to the two men, he felt Giles Habibula’s sob of gladness.
“A long time we waited, lad.
Mortal long—”
“The pit?”
He peered at it blankly, as Giles Habibula dragged him apprehensively back from the brink.
“Where are we?”
“That’s where the prison was.”
The old soldier’s voice was a thin rasp of dread.
“After the raiders had taken the prisoner away, a red light shone down from the sky, where their invisible craft must have been.
Beneath it, the walls crumbled into nothing.
The very ground turned into red fire, and sank away.
Ah, lad, that fearful pit is all that’s left of the prison and the garrison and the Legion cruisers that were lying inside the wall.
I don’t understand—”
“So he got away?”
Bob Star turned heavily back toward that strange chasm, feeling sick enough to throw himself into it.
He had failed the Legion, and the consequences numbed his mind.
Nothing mattered now.
Dull, incurious, his eyes lifted to that fitful shifting glare of rocket jets burning through the clouds.
“It’s landing near!” Giles Habibula was wheezing gratefully.
“The Cometeers escaped with the prisoner, and all the rest are dead, but we at least are saved.”
“Tell me,” Bob Star whispered urgently. “How did we get away?”
“We didn’t, lad,” Giles Habibula answered.
“The prisoner spared our lives—I don’t quite know why.
He told us he was really the great rebel, Oreo—but I suppose you knew that.”
“I did,” Bob Star nodded bleakly.
“My duty here was to kill him, if there was danger of his escape.”
In spite of himself, he sobbed.
“But I—I couldn’t do it.”
“Hal and I were waiting for you in the corridor outside.”
Generously, the old man seemed not to see his bitter tears.
“Of a sudden, my poor old nerves were shocked by a frightful alarm.
Gongs were ringing, and men running half-naked to their stations.
“Most of them never got there.
They fell, lad, struck down by things they never saw.
And a greenish mist dimmed my own old eyes.
My ailing body failed me.
I went down helpless with the rest— perhaps a bit before the rest, for safety’s precious sake.
“Yet for a time I clung to my dim old wits, when Hal and all the rest seemed to know nothing.
I heard the clatter of locks, and saw those great doors turning.
Then I could hear some sort of fearsome creatures passing through—things I couldn’t see.
“Presently the prisoner Oreo came walking out of his cell, speaking and making gestures to what seemed to be just empty air.
He was answered by uncanny hoots and booms of sound, fit to freeze your blood.
And your own body came after him, lad, floating—carried by something I felt grateful not to see.
“The prisoner pointed out Hal and me, and something came to lift us—what it was, I don’t know.
But we were carried from the prison and dumped here on this frosty ground—without a blanket or an extra jacket or even a blessed bite to eat.
“Near us was some great ship—there was nothing I could see, but I heard machinery running, and the clang of the air-locks opening.