Hal—and Giles!
I had given you up.”
He brought them into the luxurious simplicity of that long, hidden room, and closed the door.
Hal Samdu’s gigantic frame relaxed to the warmth of it, and Giles Habibula hurried back to the galley to bring hot food, but Bob Star could find neither comfort nor appetite.
“I tried—” he burst out suddenly.
“I really tried, commander!”
He set down a cup of steaming soup, unable to swallow.
“But I— couldn’t.”
His thin face was twisted with a savage self-reproach.
“I’m just the coward Oreo said—”
“Don’t say that.”
Jay Kalam shook his head. “I’m too familiar with the effects of such devices as the Iron Confessor to blame you at all.
But I wanted to give you a chance to test yourself—partly for your own sake.”
“Thank you, commander,” Bob Star whispered bitterly.
“But I failed!
I let Stephen Oreo get away, to plot the murder of my mother and lead the Cometeers against the System—“
“No.”
Jay Kalam’s voice was gravely decisive.
“If there is any fault, it is my own, for holding a standard of honor too high.
Perhaps I should have ordered Oreo killed.
I know I should have let your mother destroy the cometary object.”
“Are you sure?”
The commander nodded grimly.
“The way the Cometeers received our attempted gesture of friendship proves that they are absolutely devoid of the high qualities I had hoped to find.
But let me tell you!
“Not three hours after we had left Neptune, the telltale screens began to flash.
There was nothing we could see with the tele-periscopes, but the gravity detectors betrayed an invisible object of fifty thousand tons, approaching behind us—as if it had followed us from Neptune.
“In hope of establishing peaceable communication, I ordered the heligraph room to flash a signal: We are friends.
I am certain, from all the recent reports of invisible raiders, that the Cometeers know us well enough so they can read such messages.
“They are no longer our friends, however.
Before we had time to repeat the signal, the Invincible was caught by some tremendous, unseen force.
The geodynes were helpless against it.
Like a pebble on a string, we were drawn toward that hostile craft.
“Can you conceive an invisible beam of energy, Bob—a tubular field of force, a mathematician might call it—strong enough to drag the Invincible against her fighting geodynes, five thousand miles in five minutes?
That’s what happened.
“Then a red light burned for a moment among the stars—hi the direction of that invisible ship.
And the Invincible was destroyed. All the afterpart of the ship was somehow—annihilated!”
“Aye!”
Giles Habibula put down his spoon long enough to shudder.
“I’ve seen that fearful light.
I watched it melt the prison away, and leave that dreadful pit.”
“I wonder what it could be.”
The commander rubbed his lean jaw, thoughtfully.
“Matter can’t be destroyed—even your mother’s weapon, Bob must act in some way to keep the universe hi balance, even while it seems to cancel planets out.
I’ve been wondering what happened to the ship and the prison.
I believe I know.”
He nodded soberly, while the other bent nearer.
“Matter can’t be destroyed,” he repeated softly.
“But it can be transformed.
I believe that red light was the visible effect of something that dissolves atoms into neutrinos—those tiniest particles of mass, that can pass through any sort of matter undetected.”