My poor old heart came near stopping when the prisoner spoke to me.
His voice was right before me, but you couldn’t see him anywhere.
“ ‘You are Giles Habibula, the pick-lock?’ he greeted me.
‘I bow to the fame of your accomplishments.’
He laughed a little, but in a way I didn’t like.
‘I think we are brothers.’”
“Then his voice went black with hate.
‘I believe that you two are the insufficient bodyguards of the cringing fool who calls himself Bob Star,’ he said.
‘I understand that he will be conscious again.
Tell him that I have spared his life once more—to repay him for sparing mine!’
“He laughed, as if that were some sort of ugly joke.
‘Tell him you three are the only men alive on this continent,’ he went on.
‘Tell him it’s five thousand miles to the sea, and nine thousand more across the ice packs to the Isle of Shylar.
I’m afraid he won’t live to reach it—• but he’ll live to wish he had touched the button.’
“He didn’t say what button, lad.
But he laughed again—it was a fearful thing, that thick laughter from the empty air.
And then he said,
‘Tell Bob Star I’m going now to repair a blunder I made—a blunder in the disposition of his mother.’
“A valve clanged then.
Something hooted and boomed—perhaps his new friends were calling him.
The air-locks rang shut, and the green fog swirled, and the ship you couldn’t see was gone—with not a jet to push it. “For a few minutes there was silence. When I dared to lift my feeble head, I could see the marks the landing skids of that great ship had cut into the frozen ground. I had almost found the courage to get up and go back to the fort to look for help—it’s a good thing I didn’t!”
The old soldier shuddered.
“Because a beam of pale red light came down from the sky—I suppose from that ship.
It cut through the clouds, and shone down upon the fort.
A fearful thing to see!
The walls dissolved into mist and sparks and fiery dust, and the very ground sank away, until the fearful pit you see was cut into the planet.”
Giles Habibula shivered.
“Ah, me, lad!
The Cometeers are fearful enemies.
I almost wish that rocket hadn’t come back to save us.
If we live to leave Neptune, it will only be to watch mankind destroyed by weapons we don’t know and enemies we’ll never even see.”
“Don’t say it, Giles!”
Hal Samdu’s gigantic fists were knotted stubbornly.
“If we live, it will be to fight for the System and the keeper of the peace.
Come!”
He turned impatiently.
“We must look for the Legion craft, before it goes away and leaves us.”
That unsteady glare of rocket jets had vanished hi the clouds but Bob Star had felt a faint shock when the ship struck the frozen plain.
“It came down too hard,” he whispered anxiously.
“I think the rockets were misfiring, from the way the jets flickered.
I’m afraid it crashed.”
They stumbled through the bitter darkness along the lip of that chasm, toward where the jets had vanished.
What they found at last was no bright Legion cruiser, but only a pile of twisted wreckage.
“Dear life!” gasped Giles Habibula.
“This is no more than the nose of some unfortunate vessel.
It will never serve to carry anybody out of this fearful land.
We’re still to freeze and die here, as Oreo and his strange friends planned—”
Bob Star was peering dully upward at the wreck.
Great plates of armor were twisted and blackened, and massive beams projected through the torn flesh of the ship like broken bones.
Ports were shattered, like eyes blinded.