I think you should regard that incident as purely subjective—a product of your own unconscious fears and wishes, reacting to the stimulus of the agency that made you unconscious.
Rather than human beings, the Cometeers are more likely something you wouldn’t recognize as life at all.”
Bob Star stood watching the greenish blot on the comet in the tele-periscope, until the ship and the world ceased to exist.
He and that great green eye were alone in space. And the eye was drawing him onward, into its own unknown chasm.
If the Cometeers weren’t human, what were they?
Tentacled monsters?
Animate vegetables?
Crystal life, prism-shaped?
Or could the entire comet, he wondered, be a single sentient entity?
Might its intelligence exist not hi discrete individuals but somehow as an attribute of the whole?
Horror took root in his mind, feeding upon his own fantastic speculations.
Trying to find escape from those terrors of his own imagination, he went back to the astronomical task he had begun at the Purple Hall: looking for that remote asteroid which had wandered from where it should have been.
He failed to find it anywhere, but he discovered something else.
“Something’s wrong with Pluto,” he told Jay Kalam, when the commander came to relieve Mm.
A harsh rasp of wondering dread edged his weary voice.
“I’ve rechecked my observations a dozen times, and the answer is always the same.
It is drifting out of its orbit —toward the comet!
I know that sounds insane, and I hardly expect you to believe—”
“But I do.”
The commander’s dark face showed no skepticism, but only consternation.
“It fits in with the secret reports we have been receiving from the Contra-Saturn observatory.
A number of small asteroids have been drawn from their orbits into the comet—perhaps by the same sort of force that grasped the Invincible.
Now it seems they’re taking planets.”
“If they can do that—” Bob Star stood voiceless, trembling with his fearful expectations.
The tall commander shrugged, with a grave acceptance of whatever might come.
“You’re tired, Bob,” he said.
“Go back to your quarters and get some sleep.”
Bob Star reeled away like a run-down robot.
He dropped, fully dressed, upon his berth.
But sleep evaded him—because the green eye of the comet still watched him.
It had followed him into his cabin, and it searched his very mind.
The thin whine of the generators was an eerie, hypnotic melody.
His numbed brain broke it into weird minor bars.
When it carried him at last into an uneasy half-sleep, fear went with him. Nightmares came, in which the Cometeers pursued him, shapeless and unseen. He woke again, with the distant screams of Mark Lardo in his ears, and stood his watch, and tried once more to sleep.
For four such haunted days, the ship drove on toward the comet. At last, with a bleak satisfaction in his voice, he could report to Jay Kalam:
“In five hours, at our present rate of deceleration, we ought to reach the surface of the object.”
“If the Cometeers let us!”
Bob Star left the bridge.
Too restless to sleep, he made a tour of the cruiser.
In the power room, he found Giles Habibula sitting on the floor beside the geodynes, fat legs spread wide.
Empty bottles lay scattered around him, and he was very drunk.
At sight of Bob Star, he started apprehensively.
“Mortal me!” he gasped.
“You gave me a fearful fright, lad.
My first fancy was to see some monstrous thing creeping in to destroy me.
Ah, it’s a fearful voyage!”
He fumbled among the bottles, and found one not quite empty.
“Sit down, lad, and share a drop of wine.
The precious warmth of it will thaw a little of the cold terror from your heart.
Ah, poor old Giles would have made a sorry soldier, Bob, but for the red courage that comes foaming from the bottle!