Bob Star seized the old man’s pudgy arm.
“Then the danger isn’t just imagination?”
His hard fingers tightened.
“And you knew about that green comet—how long ago?”
The old man squirmed and shook his head.
“No, no, lad!” he muttered hastily.
“There’s nothing at all to worry about, not here on Phobos.
You just dragged me out of sleep too mortal sudden.
My poor old wits are still fogged and groggy.
You must pay no heed, lad, to the babblings of a battle-shaken veteran of the Legion.”
“What about the comet?”
“Please, lad!
I know nothing.
In life’s name—”
“It’s too late, Giles.”
His fingers sank deeper.
“You’ve already talked too much.
If you don’t want to tell me what this is all about— and why it’s being kept from me—I can ask some awkward questions.”
“Then stop it, lad!” the old man moaned.
“You needn’t shake me like a dying rat.”
Waiting breathlessly, Bob Star released his arm.
“A whisper in the Legion.
I’ve no secrets of the Council, lad.
And it was your own father who ordered us to keep it from you.
You won’t let on that Giles breathed a word about it?”
“My own father!” Bitterness heightened Bob Star’s anxiety.
“He thinks I’m a weakling and a coward.”
“Not so, lad,” muttered Giles Habibula.
“He was just afraid the worry of it, and the mortal shock, might be too much for you.”
“He doesn’t trust me,” Bob Star whispered.
“But tell me about this comet—if that’s what it is.”
“I’ve your promise, lad, not to tell him?”
“I promise,” Bob Star said.
“Go on.”
Cautiously, the old soldier drew him across the grass, into the shelter of a clump of white-flowering frangipani.
He glanced uneasily about the great roof, and up at the mighty central tower of the Purple Hall, which was already ablaze in the sunlight above them.
“The fearful thing was first seen ten weeks ago.”
His nasal voice sank to a hissing whisper.
“Picked up by the great free-space observatory at Contra-Saturn Station.
It was plunging toward the Solar System, with a velocity that threw the astronomers into fits.”
He caught apprehensively at Bob Star’s arm.
“But you’ll remember, lad?
You’ll not give poor old Giles away, for the stupid blunder of his tongue?
Your father’s a stern man.
Even though he and I are comrades of that great voyage to the Runaway Star.—You’ll remember?”
“I keep my word,” Bob Star said.
“But what’s so alarming about this comet?”
“It’s like no other,” the old man wheezed.
“It’s no frail thing of pebbles and ionized gas, and it’s larger than any other comet ever was.
The astronomers don’t know what it is.