“Shame, Giles!” Hal Samdu was rumbling.
“If we’ve any chance to destroy that human beast before he can harm Aladoree—let’s be off!”
His angry glance fell dully to his fork, and Bob Star saw that his great fingers had absently crumpled the metal.
The commander sent him to the gun turret, Giles Habibula to the power room, and Bob Star back to the bridge.
And they burst at last from freezing clouds into the clear immensity of open space.
The power tubes were burning, and life came back to the cruiser’s dead transmitter.
Using a narrow beam and limited power, with all the equipment carefully shielded, Bob Star called the relay station at the atmos-pheric plants.
There was no answer.
He increased the power and tried again, but all he heard was the dry hiss of static.
“That’s enough.”
Jay Kalam stopped him.
“We can’t risk using more power, or wasting more time.”
He gave Bob Star a brief message in code.
“This is my general order, reporting the destruction of the Invincible and the liberation of Oreo, and commanding the Legion to fight to the last—if there is any Legion left to obey.
Get it off to Contra-Saturn, and head for the comet at full acceleration.”
A dimly green, flattened ball, Neptune was falling away into a blackness pierced with stars and webbed with pale nebulae.
Bob Star shut off the rockets, after that last message was sent, and cut in the geodynes.
The sense of motion ceased, under that different sort of thrust, but the greenish planet dropped away with a magical swiftness, drawing toward the smaller ball of Triton.
Behind them, the far-off sun flamed bright but tiny in the frosty dark, shrunk to a splendid star.
Great Jupiter and tawny Saturn were faint flecks beside it on the screens of the tele-periscopes.
The smaller Earth could not be seen.
Bob Star was not looking back, however; his eyes were on the comet ahead.
He was alone on the bridge.
The only sound besides his breathing was the high-pitched humming of the hard-driven generators.
The oval, pale green blot of the comet absorbed his uneasy thoughts.
What, really, was it? What were the Cometeers?
Obviously, they were intelligent.
Superintelligent.
They were invisible, or could make themselves so.
The armament of their unseen scouting vessel had destroyed the System’s greatest fighting ship, and dissolved that prison-fortress on Neptune into nothingness.
Men knew no more of the Cometeers, but Bob Star tried apprehensively, now, to picture them.
Could they be human?
He wanted to believe they were, for their humanity meant to him the reality of the girl—or the vision—he had seen within the prison wall.
“Lad, lad!” old Giles Habibula had chided him.
“You’re dreaming.
I think your father kept you shut up in the Purple Hall too long, when you should have been out looking for such a girl to call your own.
But you mustn’t mistake your lovesick dreams for the truth.”
“Dreams!” he protested quickly.
“The girl I saw is as real as you are, Giles!
And hi terrible trouble—because, somehow, of Stephen Oreo and the Cometeers.
I still believe we’ll find her, if we ever reach the comet.“
Jay Kalam, however, had been equally skeptical.
“If the girl you think you saw were real, Bob, she couldn’t very well be a native of any planet in the System.
We have no inkling of any scientific principle that would enable the projecting of such an image as you describe, without terminal equipment.
You want to believe that she’s an inhabitant of the comet—perhaps a member of some friendly faction there.
But the odds against that are billions to nothing.”
Bob Star whispered, “Why?”
“The forms possible to life are so infinitely various,” the commander answered deliberately, “the structural adaptations of protoplasm to environmental influences are so amazingly complex, that on all the planets of all the suns of all the universe, there probably never was and never will be another race precisely like our own.”
Jay Kalam smiled at him, with a grave kindness.
“I’m afraid Giles is right, Bob.