“If I had another chance—” He sank into bitter silence for a time, until a flicker of hope aroused him.
“Couldn’t we build something that would fly, out of the wreckage?”
“I was satisfied to land it as safely as I did,” Jay Kalam said quietly.
“The best yards the Legion has could never put this mountain of broken metal back hi space again.”
“Isn’t there anything—” Bob Star had to bite his lip, to stop a sob of frustration.
“We must search, I think, for that stranger in the fog,” the commander said quietly.
“If he wasn’t a member of the garrison, it seems likely enough that he might have some means of communication with the outside.
Not a very hopeful plan, but I see none more prom-ising.”
They had searched three days for that shaggy stranger, but it was something else that Bob Star found.
He paused in the foggy night.
The light tube wavered in his hand, as if the thin beam fled from what it had discovered.
Giles Habibula crouched close to him, whispering apprehensively:
“In life’s name, what is this?”
Jay Kalam and Hal Samdu came up through the freezing dark, and they all bent to peer at what Bob Star had found: bits of torn and bloodstained cloth, a little pile of frozen viscera, a few gnawed bones, a hollowed skull still covered with scalp and yellow hair.
“This green cloth—” Bob Star picked up a torn sleeve.
“It came from a Legion uniform.”
“Ah, so!”
Giles Habibula’s voice was a thin moan of terror.
“Some poor soldier of the Legion was eaten here by the fearful monsters of the dark, as we may be—” “He must have strayed from the garrison—but I wonder what ate him.” Bob Star paused to peer around them in the greenish gloom, and he couldn’t keep from shivering. “I thought there was no wild life on this continent.”
Jay Kalam bent suddenly to pick up a bright, bloodsplashed object.
He turned it beneath the light.
It was an enameled lapel pin of white metal—the figure of a bird, grasping a tiny scroll.
The commander leaned to study it, and his breath came out between pursed lips.
“No,” he said softly, “this man didn’t come from the garrison here.
I used to know him.”
He paused and straightened, gazing soberly out into the foggy dark.
“He had pale, timid blue eyes under that yellow hair, and his voice was soft as a woman’s.
He used to paint pictures—dainty little landscapes.
He wrote what he thought was poetry, and read it aloud to his friends.
It seems queer that such a man should die this way—”
“Who was he?” Bob Star whispered.
“Justin Malkar was his name—his men used to call him Miss Malkar.
But only behind his back, because he was really a competent officer.
His crew admired him enough to give him this pin, the last time his ship came back to Earth.
A well selected gift.
He was weak as a woman for such gaudy trinkets.”
The commander bent gravely to lay the pin back on. a rock beside the scattered bones, and Bob Star said:
“I wonder what brought him here.”
“His weakness, I suppose,” Jay Kalam said.
“And Stephen Oreo’s power.
He must have been several years older than Oreo, but they held the same rank when they were ordered to join the Jupiter Patrol.
Oreo soon dominated him.
His ship was one of the first that went over to the mutineers.
Yet he wasn’t a bad man; Oreo simply understood and used his peculiar weaknesses.
“When the mutineers surrendered, Malkar’s ship was missing.
It was the Halcyon Bird, a powerful new cruiser.
Oreo told us that it had been destroyed by our atomic shot.
We soon discovered, however, that Mark Lardo had fled upon it—Lardo was a wealthy Callistonian planter who had been Oreo’s chief lieutenant.
“We suspected that their plan was for Lardo to come back on the cruiser and set Oreo free.
For the last two years, the Legion has been scouring space for the missing ship, but this is the first trace—”